Some legal analysts are sounding the alarm on former President Trump’s guilty verdict and have warned that the presumptive GOP nominee might have a chance of successfully appealing the Manhattan criminal case.
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig has criticized the New York criminal case against Trump as an “unjustified mess” and argued prosecutors “contorted the law” to get the former president.
“Prosecutors got their man, for now at least — but they also contorted the law in an unprecedented manner in their quest to snare their prey,” Honig wrote in a piece for New York magazine published Friday.
A New York jury found Trump guilty of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records on Thursday in a case brought against him by Democratic Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
“Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place,” Honig argued. “‘But they won’ is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to ‘win,’ now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.”
CNN legal correspondent Paula Reid said Sunday that while any appeals process was unlikely to play out before the election, “there are some legitimate questions to be appealed here.”
“Do I think the entire case will be overturned? That‘s a long shot, but there are absolutely issues to raise,” Reid said.
Erin Burnett, a CNN host, asked former prosecutor Mark O’Mara during her show on Thursday about Trump’s odds on appeal.
“I actually think they’re pretty good because there are a number of significant issues [with] the way this trial was handled,” O’Mara said.
O’Mara said they wouldn’t talk about Trump anymore in the appellate courts, but rather whether the judge in the case, Juan Merchan, did everything he was supposed to do to ensure a fair trial, “unaffected by the outside world.”
“The idea that this jury wasn‘t sequestered, not even during deliberations, not to mention for that week before between trial and closings. I think that’s a massive mistake that an appellate court may say, ‘here’s what’s going to happen.’ The defense is going to follow the trail and every one of these jurors, when they find out who they are and how they are, where they drove, what they did, every billboard that they saw, all of that and that’s going to be the fodder for appeals that this jury was infected by negativity, that this judge didn‘t protect their client from. That‘s just one issue, and there are 100 we can talk about,” O’Mara said.
Former trial attorney Terri Austin agreed.
“Whether or not the jury had misconduct, they had all of this time down. Did someone go on social media? Did someone talk to another juror about what was going on before they started deliberating? Did they talk to their family? All of these are reasons that could very well affect the appeal,” Austin said.
CNN host Michael Smerconish also suggested there was a legitimate path to appeal for the former president, and asked Honig to weigh in during his show on Saturday.
Smerconish argued that Trump could “truthfully say he doesn’t know for what he was convicted.” Both agreed it would be a legitimate appellate issue for the former president.
Honig also explained another appellate issue, arguing that it was unprecedented to have Bragg, a county prosecutor, enforcing federal law.
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“Appeal argument number two is going to be this, one of the bases for conviction here, one of the unlawful means is a violation of the Federal Election and Campaign Act. Do you know how many times, Michael, we have ever had in the history of this country, a state or county level prosecutor charged either as a charge or a sub-component or an unlawful means or any part of a charge a violation of federal campaign law? The answer was zero,” Honig said.
“This is the first time in American history that’s been done. And the appeals argument will be, when you have a federal regulatory structure around elections, that’s for the feds to violate. That’s not for the state or, in this case, county, Alvin Bragg is a county level prosecutor, to enforce.”
“There is an appeal that could have legs,” Arlo Devlin-Brown, a former federal prosecutor in Manhattan, told Politico.
“The combination of the prosecution offering three different theories as to how the false records could have violated state election law, limited instruction on what some of those theories required, and the fact that jurors were not required to agree on which had been proven creates a real issue for the appeal,” Devlin-Brown said.
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Cyrus Vance Jr., the former Manhattan District Attorney, joined NBC’s “Meet the Press” on Sunday to discuss the verdict. He suggested there would be “strong appeals.”
“Well certainly, there will be strong appeals, and there are going to be issues that will be carefully considered by the appellate courts,” he said. Asked what Trump’s best case for an appeal might be, Vance cited the judge’s jury instructions and the notion that the jurors didn’t have to agree on the underlying crime advanced by Trump’s document falsification.
Fox News’ Brian Flood contributed to this report.
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