Bragg hearing with House Republicans postponed due to sentencing delay

By 
 July 12, 2024

Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg was supposed to appear before the House Judiciary Committee's select subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government on Friday, but the hearing was postponed because the sentencing that was set to precede it was delayed until September.

Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts of falsifying business records that were supposedly related to hush money payments, but it is unclear what will happen to the case in the wake of a presidential immunity ruling by the Supreme Court.

The sentencing isn't even scheduled until September 18, giving prosecutors and defense attorneys time to hash out the ruling's impact.

Notably, Judge Juan Merchan said in the ruling to postpone the sentencing that it will take place "if such is still necessary."

The problem

The problem is that Merchan allowed evidence to be presented during the trial that pertains to official acts by Trump as president.

Trump's attorneys objected at the time on immunity grounds, but Merchan ignored their

It's going to be nearly impossible to put that toothpaste back in the tube at this point, which means Merchan and Bragg may need to start over with a new trial that excludes that evidence.

"The verdicts in this case violate the presidential immunity doctrine and create grave risks of 'an Executive Branch that cannibalizes itself,'" Trump lawyers Todd Blanche and Emil Bove wrote in their letter, quoting the Supreme Court's ruling. The ruling stated that evidence about official acts cannot be introduced "even on charges that purport to be based only on his unofficial conduct."

Convoluted case

National Review goes into much greater detail about why the guilty verdict needs to be vacated. It's complicated because Bragg overcomplicated the entire case so he could put forward extremely convoluted logic about why Trump did something wrong.

Bragg brought in Jeff Sessions, who had been attorney general under Trump, and tried to make it sound like Sessions intervened in 2018 to make some issue with the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA) go away.

Besides the fact that this would have been an official act while Trump was in office, Sessions would not have had the authority to do it, anyway, Trump's team said.

A sham and a mess

The whole trial was a sham and a mess, starting with Merchan's conflicts of interest that should have gotten him recused.

With his postponement of the sentencing and comments around that, however, it appears he now realizes he needs to at least consider a complete re-do in light of the immunity ruling.

If he doesn't just drop the whole thing.

" A free people [claim] their rights, as derived from the laws of nature."
Thomas Jefferson