Written by Alan Dershowitz
Does anyone actually believe that if someone else were accused of paying hush money to avoid a sex scandal in the manner that Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, he would be prosecuted?
When I was coming of age in the 1950s Southern prosecutors would target civil rights workers and search for any possible violation of the law, no matter how technical. If they discovered or invented a violation, they would indict, prosecute, convict and sentence the target.
Often the violation would be of an obscure statute that had never before been deployed. To paraphrase the late Justice Robert Jackson, these anachronistic statutes and precedents lie around “like loaded weapons“ ready to be selectively enforced against political enemies.
That, precisely, is what we are now seeing with the Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg, targeting the former president and current candidate, Donald Trump. Does anyone actually believe that if someone else were accused of paying hush money to avoid a sex scandal in the manner that Mr. Trump is suspected of doing, he would be prosecuted?
After spending months searching the criminal code for a law that Mr. Trump might be accused of violating, Mr. Bragg has apparently landed on a highly questionable campaign contribution provision that has never before been used in a comparable situation.