In June 2021, Voice of America (VoA) reported:
Russian President Vladimir Putin said Wednesday that jailed opposition leader Alexey Navalny got what he deserved when he was sentenced to prison.
According to VoA, Navalny was sentenced to 2.5 years in jail “for violating terms of a suspended sentence he had been given after a 2014 embezzlement conviction he has claimed was politically motivated.”
Back in January 2021, the Washington Post reported that Navalny had three criminal investigations going on against him, “all of them politically motivated” according to Navalny himself. Soon thereafter, President Joe Biden strongly condemned the imprisonment of Navalny as “politically motivated” and part of efforts by the Russian president to “suppress freedom of expression and peaceful assembly.”
Biden also demanded Navalny’s immediate and unconditional release.
Such are things in totalitarian Russia. Now, fast forward to March 30, 2023 and the United States of America:
Former President Donald Trump has been indicted as part of the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s years-long investigation, possibly for hush money payments. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been investigating Trump for hush money payments made leading up to the 2016 presidential election.
This indictment is so obviously political, so blatantly an effort at stopping a political opponent to the sitting American president, that it is surprising there is even a debate over this.
The political nature of DA Bragg’s case manifests itself in two ways. First, there is the legal nature of the case—or lack thereof. In order to get a conviction, Bragg will have to go to such extremes that his case will be blown open as nothing but a Putin-style show trial. Maybe he is willing to do a political hack job; maybe he has been promised a high-ranking job in President Biden’s administration after 2024. I have no idea—but Bragg, who previously decided that the case against Trump was too weak to even consider, has apparently found a new, very lucrative reason to go after the former president.
That reason cannot be legal. Already when the first rumors of an indictment started flying around, Jonathan Turley with The Hill pointed out the extremely thin legal ground for Bragg’s case. According to Turley, the Manhattan DA, elected to prosecute New York state law, is trying to get a case to court under federal law:
Although it may be politically popular, the case is legally pathetic. Bragg is struggling to twist state laws to effectively prosecute a federal case long ago rejected by the Justice Department against Trump over his payment of “hush money” to former stripper Stormy Daniels. … It is extremely difficult to show that paying money to cover up an embarrassing affair was done for election purposes as opposed to an array of obvious other reasons.