Moves by Democrats to charge and arrest former President Donald Trump will only make him a popular "martyr", political pundits have warned.
New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg, elected a Democrat, is widely expected to file charges against Trump on Tuesday over years-old claims that he paid adult movie star Stormy Daniels to keep quiet about an alleged affair with her.
Prosecuting a former president would be unprecedented in US history, and is widely seen as the latest cynical attempt to disqualify Trump from standing against flagging President Joe Biden in the 2024 presidential election.
Trumped-Up Charges
Angie Wong told Sputnik that what Trump was accused of was not even a crime.
"Hush money is not a legal term," she pointed out. "The common meaning arises from bribery or blackmail."
"Bribery in this case is improper because she wasn't paid for her use of power," Wong explained. "Blackmail is improper because if anything, it was Daniels blackmailing Trump."
Prosecutors cannot pin an extortion charge on Trump either, if the alleged payment was accepted by both parties, and are therefore trying to make a case that he misused campaign funds, Wong said.
Wong said Bragg was trying to "flip" a state-level case to a federal one, after the statute of limitations on the charges had already expired. To do so they would need to present new evidence — which is where Trump's former personal lawyer Michael Cohen, jailed in 2018 on campaign finance and tax evasion charges, comes in. Cohen turned against Trump after his conviction.
The journalist also warned listeners to prepare for a "bombshell" when Cohen's former attorney Robert Costello testifies — that would "blow your mind."
"From my circles in New York, they're they're basically prepping for the fact that the bombshell is that Trump never even touched Stormy Daniels," she said.
Wong said Bragg's prosecution and the threat of Trump's arrest would polarise
"It's great that it's coming out right now," she said. "We are being forced to choose a side, whether it's Trump or somebody else. Where do you stand on this issue? And this is going to be a campaign issue."
She said the Democrats had "stepped on a landmine" by thinking they were going to see Trump in "platinum handcuffs".
"That's their fantasy," Wong scoffed. "They're even they're even doing watercolor drawings of Trump in handcuffs."
But the Democrats may now be getting cold feet about the prosecution for fear losing control of the "narrative" and "making Trump a martyr."
"If this story line continues, you're going to have Trump 24-7 on the news on both sides," the journalist predicted, recalling how Trump won the 2016 presidential election by staying in the headlines.
"That's what he did in 2016. He just owned the media air. He owned the airwaves... even if you hated him, you wanted him dead. It didn't matter. He was always on the news," Wong argued. "This trial is going to put him back in that same level again going into '24."
Chilling Effect
Tyler Nixon told Sputnik that Trump had every right to call on his millions of supporters to come out and protest against attempts to perp-walk him through the streets of his hometown New York.
“Who wouldn't be outraged to be hounded like this” after fighting to become president, Nixon asked.
“He faced serious, serious odds against him,” and was “savaged up and down” unlike “almost any president in history,” Nixon said. “And now they're going to have some half-assed New York DA try to try to sort of cobble together a misdemeanor charge.”
Sputnik presenter Lee Stranahan pointed out that Bragg’s election campaign received a $1 million donation from Hungarian-born billionaire George Soros — who also funded Ukrainian NGOs involved in the US-sponsored 2014 Euromaidan coup in Kiev.
Nixon argued that the Congressional Select Committee hearings into the January 6 2021 protest occupation of the Capitol building was intended to “chill” opposition to the Biden government as it marches towards military confrontation with Russia.
The jailing of January 6 protesters will “cause people to pre censor themselves or to chill their willingness to come out and to physically go and take to the streets in protest or to show up and rally for Trump out of fear,” he said.
The commentator agreed that Trump’s bid for the presidency in 2024 would only be strengthened by the latest attempt to disqualify him through a criminal conviction.
“I think any reasonable person sees that he has been absolutely persecuted and they should just leave him alone,” Nixon said. “If he's so bad and he's so disliked by people, let him bury himself. But they just keep raising his stature by going after him as they do.”