A member of the Federal Election Commission says that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s indictment of President Donald Trump over bookkeeping entries, offenses he claims are felonies, is essentially a waste of time.
The Washington Examiner interviewed Commissioner James E. “Trey” Trainor, who explained the circumstances of those entries already were investigated, and a case against anyone other than the lawyer who made suspect payments was rejected.
“It’s not a campaign finance violation. It’s not a reporting violation of any kind,” he told the Examiner.
Bragg’s scenario is that Trump’s former lawyer paid money to a stripper to keep quiet about an affair she allegedly had with Trump – even though both deny it happened.
Those payments then were made into felonies because they somehow impacted the 2016 election, Bragg claims.
But Trainor said Bragg is just “trying to make a square peg fit into a round hole.”
He explained the FEC and the Department of Justice already looked at the evidence, and dismissed it as supporting no case.
“With that as background, Trainor told Secrets today that it will be hard for a judge or jury to come up with a different conclusion since it’s the FEC and DOJ that prosecute federal campaign finance law. He reiterated that in a Tuesday tweet that showed the FEC hearing room, and he wrote, ‘This is where campaign finance violations are tried,'” explained the Examiner’s Paul Bedard in his column.
Trainor, who was appointed by Trump, said, in the case, former Trump lawyer Michael Cohen already accepted a plea deal and took the blame for what happened.
“At the end of the day, there’s the person who committed the crime, and there’s the person who is behind bars because of it,” Trainor said of Cohen. Further, he pointed out the paperwork violation was after Trump’s election win, so it could not have impacted the election.
Further, the evidence just didn’t make it clear that any of the payments were to “influence” an election.
He said, “I don’t know how you get around the evidence that both the Department of Justice in their investigation of the federal campaign finance issues and the Federal Election Commission in their ultimate jurisdiction over campaign finance issues, neither of them found there to be any violations whatsoever, and I think the jury is going to see that and they’re going to have to rely upon the fact that both the law enforcement experts and the civil enforcement experts, as far as campaign finance are concerned, didn’t find any violation of the law here.”
via wnd
