Photo Illustration by Luis G. Rendon/The Daily Beast/Reuters
When the Manhattan District Attorney finally indicted former President Donald Trump in March, Alvin Bragg made the curious decision to not detail Trump’s crimes in the official indictment—something critics seized on almost immediately to say this was an overblown case.
While previous investigators had wrestled with how to charge Trump with felonies, Bragg overcame that hurdle by essentially charging Trump with 34 misdemeanor counts of faking business records—then leveling them up to felonies in a parallel legal document. Under New York law, faking business records is only a felony if it’s done while committing another crime. In this case, prosecutors say Trump hid his 2016 porn star hush money payment in order to break election laws, therefore the 34 counts of taking business records become felonies.
But according to a source familiar with the Trump legal team’s internal discussions, the former president’s lawyers are now exploring how to use that otherwise ingenious move as a weakness to severely power down the case. And Trump’s lawyers believe their new tactic could force the DA to reconsider if this is a fight worth having.