Should Donald Trump refuse to participate in his show trial in Manhattan?

I'm serious. Democratic prosecutors in New York are bringing a fundamentally corrupt case against Trump. Maybe he needs to stop legitimizing his tormentors.

The Manhattan prosecution of Donald Trump is an embarrassment to the American justice system.

Like Trump or dislike him (and as you know, I dislike him), he is neck-and-neck with Joe Biden in the 2024 Presidential election. Trying the leader of the opposition party on criminal charges is no small matter in a democracy. It should be reserved for very serious crimes - espionage, for example - with irrefutable evidence.

As I wrote Monday, this indictment is the opposite.

Trump faces 34 felony counts for the way he classified internal accounting entries. Prosecutors are relying on hyper-aggressive legal theories and making the case a referendum on Trump’s 2016 victory over Hillary Clinton, which was wildly unpopular in New York. They are almost openly telling the jury to punish Trump for having won.

So what, if anything, can Trump do at this point?

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(Giving it to you straight, for 20 cents a day.)

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The case against Trump fails on every level and twists the purpose of the statute being used against him beyond recognition.

Laws against falsifying business records are clearly meant to protect people outside a business who rely on its profit-and-loss statements in deciding whether to lend or invest in it. They’re also meant to protect the business itself from employee theft.

Those rationales don’t apply in this case.

No one stole from the Trump Organization. Trump did not plan to show the records to anyone else, and it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. He wasn’t trying to overstate his revenues or hide losses. He paid Michael Cohen $420,000 in 12 installments in 2017, partly to cover Cohen’s $130,000 payment in 2016 to the porn actress Stormy Daniels, who claimed Trump had an affair with her.

Trump called the $420,000 payment to Cohen “legal services.” Maybe he put it that way because he was embarrassed and didn’t want to think about Daniels anymore. Maybe he thought that “legal services” broadly fit the definition of what Cohen had done. Who cares? Trump misclassified an expense in his own records.

That’s the entire underlying crime the state is alleging.

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(Don’t take it from me. Take it from the New York Times op-ed page.)

SOURCE

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Yet the case only gets worse from there.

Falsifying business records is a misdemeanor in New York. It can only be a felony if some underlying felony is committed and the records are falsified to hide it.

But the prosecutors have not charged Trump with any underlying felonies. Though they have referred to a conspiracy by Trump to influence the 2016 election, they have not specified - not even now, not even with the trial underway - what the alleged underlying felony might be.

And, as I pointed out Monday, the actual underlying charges all relate to business records that Trump and his company created AFTER the election.

But wait, there’s more!

It is not even clear that Trump’s effort to keep Daniels quiet before the election - even if that effort somehow could be legally viewed as part of a conspiracy that extended to the creation of the business records in 2017 - broke ANY New York state laws.

And Matthew Colangelo, the prosecutor who made the opening statement against Trump, was a top Justice Department official until late 2022, when he joined the Manhattan district attorney’s office as “senior counsel.”

Going from a top federal post to a local prosecutor’s office is not a normal midcareer move. Then again, if Colangelo had stayed at Justice, he wouldn’t have gotten to help lead a case against Donald Trump, the man that Joe Biden, Colangelo’s top boss at Justice, calls a threat to democracy. Convenient.

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(Please subscribe. I’ll keep fighting - don’t forget Berenson v Biden - but I need your help!)

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The picture should be clear.

This prosecution is the opposite of one that should be brought against a major Presidential candidate. It is weak, legally twisted, and overtly political. And the prosecution is framing it more or less openly as an way to punish Trump for having won in 2016.

It should never have reached a jury. But - in Manhattan, where local judges come in two flavors, liberal and leftist - it has.

This case is not like the other criminal indictments Trump faces. Those all have flaws, and the Georgia case is particularly troubled, thanks to Fani Willis’s personal antics. But what is happening in Manhattan right now is impossible to square with the rule of law.

Maybe Donald Trump needs to make clear that he will no longer participate in it in the most basic way possible - by giving up any effort in his own defense.

Maybe he needs to fire his lawyers and sit mute and quiet and alone at the defense table until he is convicted, and then dare the judge to sentence him to prison as a first-time 77-year-old nonviolent offender for a business records violation.

This tack is unrealistic, of course, if not outright impossible.

It would go against Trump’s instincts, which are to shout and fight at every opportunity. I am not even sure if the judge would allow him to dismiss his counsel mid-case. And presumably his lawyers would tell him he’s crazy to do so, that he needs to create a record for appeal.

Yet nothing is more powerful than the innocent defendant who refuses to participate in the spectacle of his own humiliation, who simply says: this game is rigged and I will not play.

Donald Trump, quiet and dignified, awaiting a fate he does not deserve.

Wouldn’t that be something?