As Donald Trump and his political allies continue lobbing attacks at the judicial proceedings recently faced by the former president in New York City that resulted in a guilty verdict on all counts, former federal prosecutor Barb McQuade is speaking out. She’s currently a law professor.
In a series of posts on X (formerly known as Twitter), McQuade defended specifically the part of the local prosecutor’s case against Trump where the originally misdemeanor charges were upped to felony status by way of alleging that the accused falsifications of business records were undertaken to conceal other criminal activity. Prosecutors tied the records situation, which was related to hush money for a woman named Stormy Daniels, to an allegedly covert ambition of impacting the 2016 presidential election in a fashion beneficial to Trump.
“The criticism that Alvin Bragg somehow improperly turned 34 misdemeanors into felonies is a fallacy. The legislature did that by adding enhanced penalties when someone falsifies records to conceal another crime. That’s because it is a more serious offense deserving of higher punishment,” McQuade wrote online.
And elsewhere, she went after the idea that prosecutors had lagged in revealing the contours of the additional criminal activity that they alleged of Trump.
“There is another false argument floating around that the prosecution did not reveal the crime Trump was accused of committing until closing argument. That’s false. The offenses were charged in the indictment and the unlawful means were disclosed in legal filings in November 2023,” she said.
Now on the horizon for Trump are a sentencing and appeals. In an interview on ABC News, Trump attorney Will Scharf expressed characteristic confidence that the ex-president would prevail in appeals to the point that he’d eventually end up subject to no sentencing at all. Scharf also promoted in the interview a conspiracy theory of secret involvement in the proceedings by President Joe Biden and his team, rebutted by host George Stephanopoulos in real time.
