By Ashley Oliver. Media: Washingtonexaminer
A member of the Federal Election Commission testified to Congress on Thursday that the Manhattan district attorney who led the prosecution of former President Donald Trump overstepped his authority.
Trey Trainor, a Trump-appointed commissioner who once served as FEC chairman, said during a hearing that District Attorney Alvin Bragg, an elected Democrat, inappropriately incorporated a federal election campaign law into his charges against Trump.
“Bragg has effectively usurped the jurisdiction that this Congress has explicitly reserved for federal authorities,” Trainor said during a House Judiciary Committee hearing. “This overreach sets a troubling precedent for politicization of legal proceedings at the state level.”
Trump was convicted of falsifying business records in the first degree, a charge that requires the defendant to have violated another law in addition to the falsification of records.
In Trump’s case, Bragg argued Trump also violated New York election law’s section 17-152. The statute states that it is against the law to conspire to influence an election “by unlawful means.”
Bragg gave the jury three options for what those unlawful means could have been. One of the options was that Trump violated the Federal Election Campaign Act. The other two options were additional falsifications of records or tax violations.
The jury did not have to agree on what unlawful means Trump used to violate section 17-152, only that he violated the overarching state law. In other words, some jurors could have decided Trump breached FECA to reach their guilty conclusion. The jurors did not have to document which of the three unlawful means options they chose to arrive at their guilty verdict, so there is no way to know if any of them used FECA.
Bragg alleged that Trump violated FECA because the $130,000 payment to porn star Stormy Daniels in 2016, which was at the center of Trump’s charges, exceeded the legal campaign donation limit.
Michael Cohen, Trump’s then-lawyer, used his personal money to issue the payment ahead of the 2016 election to silence Daniels about an alleged affair she had with Trump. Then, according to evidence in Bragg’s case, Trump built a reimbursement for Cohen into payments the Trump Organization made to Cohen in 2017. Trump and his defense team argued that Trump believed his payment plan to Cohen was lawful and that his accounting team accurately recorded it in his company’s financial statements as “legal expenses.”
Trainor noted how the Department of Justice “vigorously” investigated the Daniels payment and declined to prosecute Trump.
Trainor said that FEC disclosures stated the DOJ conducted a lengthy investigation on the matter and found no wrongdoing on Trump’s part. He also said that once the DOJ concluded its investigation, the FEC declined to address the payment at all because it was beyond the statute of limitations.
“This revelation underscores the problematic nature of Bragg’s prosecution and his intrusion upon federal jurisdiction,” Trainor said.
Judge Michael Obus, who presided over criminal cases in Manhattan for about 27 years, told reporters after Trump’s conviction that one issue Trump could raise on appeal could be that FECA was used as an option for jurors as they weighed how Trump violated the New York election statute.
“Since one of the alternatives was this federal election violation, that’s the kind of argument that we might see on appeal, [an] argument being that New York courts don’t have the authority to prosecute a case with that being the object crime, because it’s a federal crime,” Obus said.
Bragg, for his part, will have an opportunity to address concerns about the case at another hearing before Congress on July 12. The district attorney told lawmakers he would come to Washington to testify after Trump’s sentencing hearing, which is set for July 11.