The Merchan of Menace

Or How Bragg Will Sentence You to Prison for Double-Parking (If You're MAGA)

Trump will be sentenced in September unless Judge Juan Merchan agrees to postpone the sentencing decision until after the election. He has the option of delaying the sentence because, (a) he’s a dicator and does what he wants and (b) his boss wrote a letter giving him the option.

His boss, Alvin Bragg, has handed this hot potato decision off to Merchan, likely because Bragg knows either way the decision is made, it’s radioactive. So Bragg figures Merchan can be the fall guy.

This is another example of how liberals often make rash, crazy decisions like prosecuting a former president on bogus charges and then are perplexed when these decisions have totally foreseeable but to liberals utterly unexpected consequences. For example, going after a Presidential candidate right before an election (for a crime that is 7 years in the past) sounded like a swell idea until Bragg realized now he had to either send Trump to prison right at the high point of the 2024 campaign (not likely a popular decision with one half of the entire country) or let him off the hook (likely a decision that would prompt liberal emotional collapse, not to mention likely looting and fights).

Ah, Democrats and unintended consequences!

As you likely know, Trump has been charged with multiple felonies which are actually a series of the same couple of misdemeanors. It’s important to understand how this works because if they do it to him, they can do it to any of us!

In the United States, we have lesser crimes—misdemeanors—and more serious crimes—felonies. (Gee, I sound like Kamala explaining the war in Ukraine. Bear with me, I promise not to cackle like a drunken fool.)

However, if you commit a misdemeanor in order to commit a felony, the prosecutor (in this case Alvin Bragg) has the ability to inflate those misdemeanors into felonies. And in this sad example of American injustice, Alvin Bragg is literally making a federal case out of serial misdemeanors.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say you rob a bank. But in order to rob that bank, you double-park your car in front of the bank. Double-parking is in itself just a misdemeanor. You can get a ticket for that, but that’s about all. You likely will have to pay a fine. You don’t go to prison. Even in Texas, nobody has ever been executed for double-parking. But if you double-park expressly because you want to rob the bank, you will get charged for the felony—bank robbery—and the prosecutor has the ability to elevate the double-parking misdemeanor into a felony.

Double parking is not really a felony, but if you did it in order to commit a felony, they can make even double-parking into a felony. So the prosecutor could slap you with two felony charges: one for bank robbery and the other for double parking in order to commit bank robbery.

In real life, prosecutors do not often do this because the big crime is what they go after. They don’t try to confuse the jury with a bunch of petty charges tacked on. It’s really kind of silly, but prosecutors have lots of games up their monogrammed sleeves. One of them is that they can make a misdemeanor committed “in furtherance of a felony” into a felony. In that case, the main crime of bank robbery becomes what is called the “predicate felony.”

You need a predicate felony in order to make double-parking into a felony.

Now let’s come back to Alvin Bragg, Trump’s prosecutor. Donald Trump’s organization—not Donald Trump himself but those who worked for his organization—were making payments to Stormy Daniels as part of a nondisclosure agreement (NDA). NDAs are legal and quite common. (In fact, Congress has tons of NDAs with people who accused various Congresspeople of sexual harassment; Congress paid them a settlement and they signed an NDA. It’s how it’s done, son.)

In this case, in return for not sharing or going public with specific information, Stormy Daniels was given some money. Trump’s organization paid her in installments and his attorney, Michael Cohen, was handling this along with many other matters for the Trump organization.

For Stormy Daniels, Cohen worked out an installment plan and each step involved at least two pieces of independent paperwork. First, they issued a voucher requesting that a check be cut and then they cut her a check. This type of system is not unusual in large businesses. Both documents were signed and both said the payment to Daniels was to be booked as a “legal fee.”

It's easy to see why they called it a legal fee. The fee was paid by Donald Trump’s attorney for something he set up for Trump. After all, this is the same attorney who drafted the NDA with Daniels in the first place. Trump’s attorney negotiated the payments and set up the installment plan. The Trump organization put it in their records as a “legal fee.” The 34 felonies you hear the mainstream media screech about are all the same “felony,” but just in two parts (voucher and check) and installments. Good thing Michael Cohen didn’t put her on a five-year plan, Trump would be facing 120 felonies.

At issue is that the Trump campaign called this a “legal fee” rather than a “campaign contribution.” (Otherwise everything that was done was 100% legal.) Such record-keeping mistakes are common. Hillary Clinton’s campaign made the exact same mistake when they booked $1M in payments to British spy Christopher Steele for the so-called “Steele dossier” or opposition research on Trump prior to the 2016 election. Hillary’s payments were made through the law firm Perkins Coie and were booked as “legal fees.” Understandable.

But campaign financing laws in America are very strict. The federal election campaign people found Hillary’s mistake and brought it to her attention. You’ve never heard of this, because it was done discretely and with respect for her. She was told to have the matter corrected (which she did) and to pay a fine (which she also did—about $100,000 for a $1M clerical error). And, like Trump, Hillary doesn’t do her own bookkeeping; this was an organizational error rather than a personal misdeed. Hillary was shown respect and asked to make the correction and pay a fine. Trump was hauled before court and his mugshot taken. Now he’s facing prison.

Although Trump’s organization is being charged with having done the very same thing Hillary’s campaign did, I’m not sure that’s true. The NDA to Stormy Daniels is perceived by Alvin Bragg not as a legal expense but rather as a “campaign donation” because Bragg believes it was to Trump’s advantage to keep Stormy’s potential story-telling under wraps in the election. This would sit better with me if the payments were made in 2016, the election year. They weren’t. They were made in 2017. I don’t see how you can argue that something paid in 2017 was a campaign donation to affect the election that took place in 2016. But here we are. Besides, does anyone think Trump or his campaign actually cares what Daniels has to say? Joy Behar says worse about Trump every day and it rolls off Trump like water off a duck’s back.

Unlike Hillary, Trump was charged with 34 felonies for the 34 pieces of paperwork (check and vouchers) that contained this error. Now in actual fact, they are a series of misdemeanors. Making a bookkeeping error in campaign finance is a crime, but it’s a minor crime. And it’s not 34 distinct crimes, it’s 34 pieces of paper all relating to one single misdemeanor—misbooking payments to Daniels as “legal fees” instead of “campaign donations.”

So how is it that social media keeps calling him a “convicted felon” and how is he facing a potential prison term? He’s technically not a felon until he’s sentenced and all he’s been found guilty of is a misdemeanor that his political opponent made, too—only she was allowed to just pay a fine.

Prosecutor Alvin Bragg and Judge Juan Merchan (whose daughter has made tens of millions of dollars since the Trump travesty as a Democrat campaign advisor) elevated all of the 34 misdemeanors to felonies because they were allegedly committed “in furtherance of a predicate felony.” Remember, the term “predicate felony” is a legal term meaning “the big-deal underlying crime on which all of these lesser charges have been made into felonies.”

The problem is that in Trump’s case, they never mention what the predicate felony even is… much less have they proved it in a court of law. There is no predicate felony except in the Trump-deranged minds of Bragg and Merchan. And they won’t tell us what it is.

It’s kind of important to their case. You’d think they would know what it was.

Let me scare you as to how this affects all of us.

Let’s say you double-park in the vicinity of a bank. Now let’s say Alvin Bragg is the District Attorney and he knows that you don’t vote Blue. In fact, he knows you don’t like him. So he arrests you and charges you with felony double-parking. You go to court for felony double-parking. They tell you the penalty for felony double-parking is 10 years. When your attorney asks, “What’s the predicate felony for this elevated charge?” The judge hits you with a gag order. Neither you nor your attorney can mention that there is no underlying charge. (Although the case is technically over now except for sentencing, Trump is still under a partial gag order—another unheard of banana republic move).

Just like Trump, you get a jury. However, it’s a jury of people who love Alvin Bragg and know you don’t like him. The judge instructs the jury that they have to decide if you committed double-parking, a felony that cost you 10 years in prison. But then the judge says, this double-parking had to be committed in furtherance of a felony. Now the judge leans back in his big judge-chair and refuses to name the felony and says it doesn’t need to be stated, much less even proved.

• Maybe you double-parked to rob a bank.

• Maybe you double-parked to commit arson.

• Maybe you double-parked to kidnap a child.

It doesn’t matter, the judge tells the jury that if they feel that a felony was involved somewhere, then they can convict you on felony double-parking even without proving the predicate felony. In fact, the judge even says that if the jury just thinks you were committing a predicate felony, that’s sufficient. What predicate felony? Well, the judge named a few possibilities: bank robbery, arson, kidnapping, but he says it could be any number of things. Then he adds that the jury does not even have to agree what the predicate felony even was, much less does the court have to prove it.

All they need to decide is this: did you double-park? Too bad for you, you did. They have you on one of those traffic cameras.

Ten years. The predicate felony is irrelevant as long as the jury thinks there might have been one involved.

Few of us are ever going to be charged with federal campaign law violations. However, the banana republic principles of Bragg and Marchan are very real and could affect us. After all, if a billionaire former President can be thrown in jail on this kind of bogus charge … what hope do any of us have? Next time you go too fast in a school zone or jaywalk or your dog barks too much… get ready for the Judges Merchan of this country to send you to prison for years!