Former President Donald Trump scored a pair of legal victories this past week when the gag order in his New York civil fraud case was lifted and an attempt to get him kicked off the ballot in Colorado got shot down.
Now, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg is scrambling to keep the former president from pulling off another win.
According to ABC News, Bragg submitted a court filing on Thursday in opposition to Trump's motion for his charges to be dropped.
Bragg made headlines in March when he indicted the former president on charges related to an alleged hush money payment to adult film star Stormy Daniels in 2016.
Specifically, Bragg has accused Trump of having illegally falsified business records by categorizing money used to buy Daniels' silence as a legal expense.
In his motion last week, Bragg objected to arguments in an earlier motion Trump's attorneys filed last month seeking to have the case dismissed.
"President Trump cannot be said to have falsified business records of the Trump Organization by paying his personal attorney using his personal bank accounts," ABC News quoted the motion as saying.
"The pendency of these proceedings, and the manner in which they were initiated, calls into question the integrity of the criminal justice process, is inconsistent with bedrock due process principles, and is interfering with the campaign of the leading candidate in the 2024 presidential election," it added.
Bragg rejected that reasoning, writing that Trump "repeatedly suggests that because he is a current presidential candidate, the ordinary rules for criminal law and procedure should be applied differently here."
"This argument is essentially an attempt to evade criminal responsibility because defendant is politically powerful," Bragg insisted.
"This argument is essentially an attempt to evade criminal responsibility because defendant is politically powerful," he continued.
"Courts have repeatedly rejected defendant’s demands for special treatment and instead have adhered to the core principle that the rule of law applies equally to the powerful as to the powerless," the district attorney declared.
In an op-ed piece for the New York Post, Turley derided Bragg's attempt to circumvent the statute of limitations by linking his state indictment to federal campaign finance law, something the professor called "unprecedented and likely unsustainable."
