Bragg’s absurd case against Trump finally gets its undeserved day in court  Opinion by Gregg Jarrett • 10h Fox News

Former President Donald Trump, left, squares off against progressive Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg starting April 15. Photographer: Mary Altaffer/AP/Bloomberg via Getty Images Getty Images© Getty Images

Absent an eleventh-hour reprieve from a higher court, Donald Trump will become the first U.S. president to face a criminal trial when it commences on Monday in New York.  

Let the circus begin.  

The ringmaster of the Big Top clown show is Alvin Bragg, the progressive Manhattan district attorney who campaigned — unethically — on the promise to bring down Trump. Once in office, Bragg inflated a time-barred and nominal misdemeanor into a multitude of dubious felonies by mangling evidence and contorting the law.  

With a wave of his showman’s cane, Bragg transformed a singular transaction into 34 separate charges in what’s known as "count stacking" that no good prosecutor would ever do. It’s a transparent window into an otherwise opaque case.  

The gravamen of the indictment is that in 2016 Trump used his lawyer to pay money to Stephanie Clifford (a.k.a. Stormy Daniels) in exchange for her silence about a purported affair that occurred a decade earlier, that he incorrectly recorded the payments in business records, and that all of it violated election laws, even though it did not.

Bragg surely knows his case is specious, at best. But it doesn’t matter. He’s counting on the sympathies of a liberal trial judge, Juan Merchan, and the venom of a jury pool destined to be dominated by Trump-hating New Yorkers. The once-respected standard of an "impartial jury" is being treated as a mere inconvenience instead of a constitutional right.

It is self-evident to many that the charges against the former president would be brought against no one else not named Trump. The fact that he is the leading candidate for president in the upcoming election is the only reason he is being persecuted under the guise of prosecution.

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