Has Alvin Bragg bungled his case against Trump?

Well, no indictment, but there were developments!

Vocabulary word of the week: “exculpatory.” “Something that shows that someone is not guilty of wrongdoing.”

Now, use it in a sentence: “Soros-funded Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg neglected to reveal hundreds of pages of exculpatory evidence to the Grand Jury pondering whether to indict Donald Trump.”

What does it mean? It means that the orange suit that Bragg was hoping to order up for Trump may have to be retailored in a larger size, one big enough to fit him.

Some context: when a prosecutor conceals exculpatory evidence from a Grand Jury or defense attorneys he is guilty of prosecutorial abuse. He is said to have concealed “Brady material,” after the landmark 1963 Supreme Court (aren’t they all “landmark”?) Brady v. Maryland which stipulates that prosecutors must hand over such material.

In his eagerness to Get Trump (the popular new reality TV show), Bragg appears to have kept back material from the Grand Jury from which he was attempting to wrest an indictment of the former president.

Michael Cohen, Trump’s former lawyer, had testified that the payment he made to porn blip (no star, surely) “Stormy Daniels” was really a campaign contribution because it was intended to save Trump and his campaign from embarrassment. Earlier, he had testified that, no, it shouldn’t count as a campaign contribution because it was intended to save Melania, Trump’s wife, from embarrassment over a false accusation. 

Cohen’s own former lawyer, Robert Costello threw a wrench into Cohen’s new testimony. “While testifying for over two hours, Costello said he realized that Bragg had been hiding from the grand jury nearly all of the files he had previously turned over to the DA that corroborated Cohen’s original story,” Fox News’s Gregg Jarrett writes.

“Hiding from the grand jury nearly all of the files he had previously turned over to the DA.” Naughty, naughty, naughty. 

Maybe Bragg doesn’t know what “Brady material is.” Dem nominees for prosecutorial and judicial positions seem not to. The most recent instance is Kato Crews, a Denver magistrate judge who’s been nominated for a district court position. He had no idea what Brady material is, as he showed at his confirmation hearing. 

The Federalist is right that the case against Trump is “the equivalent of a nationally televised jaywalking arrest to humiliate a person due solely to personal hate.” What should our response be when prosecutors put personal politics and institutional animus above the law to persecute people? I think Rand Paul got it in one: “A Trump indictment would be a disgusting abuse of power. The DA should be put in jail.”