New York state prosecutors investigating Donald Trump over hush money paid to a porn star are prosecuting the victim, the former president’s lawyer said.
(Bloomberg) — New York state prosecutors investigating Donald Trump over hush money paid to a porn star are prosecuting the victim, the former president’s lawyer said.
Trump was victimized by the actor, Stormy Daniels, his lawyer Joe Tacopina said in an interview about the efforts by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, whose office has invited Trump to testify before a grand jury this month. Bragg is probing whether Trump and his company falsified records to conceal payments to Daniels, made ahead of the 2016 election, to keep her from going public about an alleged sexual relationship with Trump. He has denied the affair.
“What all this shows is that the DA is targeting the former president because of political reasons and personal animus,” Tacopina texted in response to questions about the grand jury invitation, which was reported late Thursday.
A spokeswoman for Bragg declined to comment. Daniels’s lawyer didn’t immediately respond to an email seeking comment on Tacopina’s remarks.
“The mantra of our current DA is ‘One standard for all,’ but it should be ‘One standard for all — except for President Trump,’” Tacopina said.
Bragg’s office has been building the case against Trump over the past two months, and the invitation suggests it may be close to indicting him. Prosecutors have interviewed Trump’s former personal lawyer Michael Cohen — who made the $130,000 hush money payment and is now a severe critic of Trump — almost two dozen times. He is meeting with Bragg’s office again Friday in an extended session, his lawyer Lanny Davis said in an interview.
Trump, who is running for the Republican presidential nomination for the 2024 race, has called the probe a political vendetta by Bragg, a Democrat.
“I did absolutely nothing wrong,” Trump said in a post on his social media platform Truth Social. “I never had an affair with Stormy Daniels, nor would I have wanted to have an affair with Stormy Daniels.”
Tacopina said New York’s laws aren’t nearly as clear as federal statutes on the use of campaign funds.
“Any prosecution around this matter would be completely unprecedented,” he wrote. “The campaign finance laws are murky and all of the underlying legal theories are untested and have never been utilized in this manner.”
He predicted that Bragg’s prosecution would be “a bad stain on the DA’s office’s legacy.”
“Any good prosecutor knows that you can’t bring a criminal case where the law is unclear, because you need to show intent to commit a crime,” Tacopina said. “And you can’t show intent when even legal scholars can’t agree on what the law is.”
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