This is incorrect.

What you fail to realize is that even though the alleged event occurred before he was in office, and was a personal matter, the prosecution introduced evidence that was covered under presidential immunity in order to prove the case.

Because of this, the judge is obligated to declare a mistrial...and the case will never be tried again, because Trump will be president or he will be dead.

The error in your thinking = *All pieces of evidence introduced by the prosecution must have come from a time before Trump was president because the event occurred before he was president*

How do you know he stole classified documents?

If you look at the evidence team Trump is pointing to, it has nothing to do with official business. There was a comment to Hope Hicks and some Tweets which occurred while he was President, but those were personal communications not related in any way to the duties of President.



Because he was caught red handed and bragging about it.

Significantly, Bragg’s prosecutors tried one additional thing to have some thin reed on which to rest their FECA allegations against Trump. Hoffinger elicited from Cohen that then–President Trump assured him that the FECA “matter is going to be taken care of and the person, of course, who is going to be able to do it is [then–Attorney General] Jeff Sessions.” In testimony that lasted less than 30 seconds, Cohen related that he had imparted this information to Pecker in order to allay his fears after Pecker was contacted by the FEC in early 2018. (See transcript, pp. 3,576–77.)

To describe this testimony as fishy would be an insult to fish. By that late point in Cohen’s direct testimony, Hoffinger had drawn out the details of several conversations Cohen recalled having with Trump. Yet, she never got around to asking him about the circumstances — the words exchanged — when the president of the United States supposedly explained to Cohen that he was having the attorney general of the United States corruptly kill a FECA probe in which the president was implicated. Instead, the state elicited this critical Cohen-Trump conversation as an afterthought: Cohen recalled telling Pecker that Sessions would take care of “the matter”; then, Hoffinger asked why Cohen had said that, and Cohen curtly replied that Trump had told him so. No follow-up questions — Hoffinger just moved on to a new subject.

Perhaps she preferred not to linger long because the story makes no sense. Sessions controlled the Justice Department. At the time in question (early 2018), Pecker and Cohen were being contacted, not by the Justice Department, but by the FEC. In administrative state jargon, the FEC is an “independent” regulatory body. It is not controlled by the attorney general, or even by the president. (The president just nominates its members, who must be confirmed by the Senate.) While the DOJ handles criminal enforcement of FECA, the FEC is in charge of civil enforcement. Putting aside the fact that Sessions is a straight arrow (who famously recused himself from the Trump-Russia collusion probe to avoid even the appearance of doing Trump’s bidding), an attorney general has no power to kill an FEC enforcement action — as Brad Smith could have explained to the jury had Merchan permitted the defense to call him.

For present purposes, my main point is not that Cohen’s testimony about Sessions is not believable; nor is it that the testimony is too weak to establish Trump’s state of mind with respect to a FECA offense (quite apart from the dearth of evidence that FECA concerns had anything to do with Trump’s 2017 record-keeping). My point is that Merchan permitted the state to prove a criminal offense against the former president based on his performance of his official duties.

This was testimony about the president’s consultations with the Justice Department about the enforcement of federal election law. Ergo, we are not talking about the outer margins of presidential power. With respect to this exact subject — namely, a president’s discussions with Justice Department officials about the exercise of the executive branch’s prosecutorial discretion — the Supreme Court, in its just-issued Trump ruling, instructed that this is a core constitutional power. It is part of the “conclusive and preclusive” ambit of executive authority as to which a president has absolute immunity. And when presidents have such immunity for official acts, Chief Justice John Roberts’s majority opinion elaborated, such acts may not be alleged as crimes per se, nor may they be used by prosecutors as evidence of crimes.

Hence, to induce the jury to find Trump guilty, Bragg used evidence of official action for which Trump had absolute immunity. It is virtually the only evidence in the case from which it could be argued — however weakly — that Trump willfully schemed to flout FECA. Such guilty verdicts cannot stand. Merchan is obligated to vacate them.

I do not think SCOTUS intended such a blanket immunity for everything a President does.