Andrew Bolt: Charges turn Donald Trump into genuine martyr

Being president shouldn’t mean freedom for life from crimes you commit. But it shouldn’t mean your opponents try extra hard to jail you.

America crossed a line – a chasm – when former president Donald Trump was charged on Tuesday with 34 flimsy crimes. Rather, the same supposed crime photocopied 34 times.

On one side of that line are civilised countries where justice is impartial.

On the other are countries where rulers use their courts to jail political rivals. You know, like communist China, war-criminal Russia and, now, the disunited states of America.

How else to see this stinking process – the ultimate expression of the hyper-partisan politics ruining the United States and now infecting Australia?

More importantly, how else will the 94 million Trump voters see this prosecution, damned even by Trump enemies?

After all, Trump, a Republican, is being charged by Alvin Bragg, a Democrat who became Manhattan’s District Attorney-General after campaigning on an explicit promise to “get Trump”.

Once elected, Bragg picked up this case, dropped by both his predecessor and by federal authorities, and has now made Trump the first former president charged with criminal offences – just after Trump announced he was running again to become president.

Of course, being president shouldn’t mean freedom for life from prosecution for crimes you commit.

Donald Trump speaks to supporters at Mar-a-Lago. Picture: Getty/AFP

But, equally, it shouldn’t mean your opponents, once in power, try extra hard to jail you.

Bragg charged Trump 34 times for the same alleged crime – paying his former lawyer for legal expenses that were in fact pay-offs.

Bragg mentioned in his indictment a $30,000 payment to a doorman who claimed, probably falsely, Trump had a secret love child.

Bragg also lasciviously mentioned a pay-off to a former Playboy model, but neither of those payments are mentioned in the charges.

So why did Bragg discuss them? Just to fling more mud at Trump?

In fact, Bragg said the 34 charges all relate to Trump allegedly paying $130,000 ($A200,000) to porn star Stormy Daniels to stop her talking about having had sex with him, and then falsely recording that payment 34 times in monthly accounts as legal expenses.

As Bragg put it: “The 34 false entries were made in New York business records to conceal the initial covert $130,000 payment.”

That already seems pathetically trivial. Paying Daniels was not illegal. So this really just comes down to an argument about the definition of the expenses.

Bragg’s office spent five years investigating THAT? That’s a mere misdemeanour, which means the statute of limitations has already run out, anyway.

But Bragg on Tuesday said what made these misdemeanours more serious – made them felonies – was that this false accounting was “to conceal criminal activity”, but he refused to say what crimes he meant. Presumably campaign finance laws, but could they even apply?

Supporters of Donald Trump gather near his residence at the Mar-a-Lago Club. Picture: Getty/AFP

Even people who hate Trump are amazed to see a former president charged by rivals over so little.

John Bolton served as Trump’s National Security Advisor until he was fired, and has since written a book damning Trump and declared the man should never be president again.

Yet Bolton, a former law partner, said these charges were “ever weaker than I feared they would be” and could end in a “quick acquittal”.

He said Bragg was wrong if he thought the payments to Daniels were a campaign expense, and therefore a breach of campaign finance laws, and also wrong to suggest state laws applied to a federal campaign.

Van Jones, a former advisor to Democrat president Barack Obama, likewise dismissed the charges as “not much”.

But the price of charging Trump will be huge.

I don’t like Trump, either, but getting rid of him with this kind of tricked-up justice is not just immoral and an abuse of power. It is dangerously divisive, making America seem a nation ruled by vendettas, not laws.

This turns Trump into a genuine martyr. Supporters will see America’s justice system perverted to get him out of the way.

What’s more, as Trump said in his speech after being charged, there’s been so many faked attempts to bring him down.

Remember the lie, promoted even by the FBI, that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the election?

So how will his fans react, if they lose faith in American justice?

What a ghastly precedent this is. Some Republicans will already dream of an eye-for-an-eye.

What odds that Democrat President Joe Biden will now face prosecution himself under a Republican administration? There’s enough muck in his son’s abandoned laptop to make that a chance.

But already we can smell the stench of a banana republic clear across the Pacific.