The Manhattan district attorney's case against former President Donald Trump was an "ill-conceived, unjustified mess," even though the jury did its job in finding the former president guilty on all 34 charges of falsifying business records, said Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's charges against Trump, "push the outer boundaries of the law and due process," Honig, the senior legal analyst for CNN, wrote in New York Magazine. "That's not on the jury. That's on the prosecutors who chose to bring the case and the judge who let it play out as it did."
The charges, Honig added, "are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented" as no state prosecutor "has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything."
Trump, the first president to become a felon, on Friday excoriated prosecutors and the judge in his criminal case, deriding the trial as "rigged."
He also said he will appeal the verdict.
"If they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone," he said. "As far as the trial itself, it was very unfair. We weren't allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances. You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side, they were literally crucified by this man."
Honig said the Manhattan DA "almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge" and that as a standalone, they would have been misdemeanors under New York law.
Instead, prosecutors inflated the charges to lowest level felony and alleged that the falsification of business records was committed "with intent to commit another crime," Honig said.
"Inexcusably, the DA refused to specify what those unlawful means actually were — and the judge declined to force them to pony up — until right before closing arguments," he said. "So much for the constitutional obligation to provide notice to the defendant of the accusations against him in advance of trial. (This, folks, is what indictments are for.)
"In these key respects, the charges against Trump aren't just unusual. They're bespoke, seemingly crafted individually for the former president and nobody else."