While former President Donald Trump has already been convicted on 34 counts of falsifying business records in the Manhattan hush money case, he has one more card to play: submitting a motion asking Judge Juan Merchan to "set aside" the verdict, a maneuver used to try to convince judges that the jury's decision to convict was so egregious it should be disregarded.
But District Attorney Alvin Bragg came prepared to shut that down, legal expert Lisa Rubin explained in a new article for MSNBC's MaddowBlog.
This comes as House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan (R-OH) prepares for a congressional hearing with former Justice Department official and Manhattan prosecutor Matthew Colangelo for immediately after Trump's sentencing. Trump's allies have theorized that Colangelo was a sort of backchannel from Bragg's office to the Justice Department, allowing President Joe Biden to dictate the outcome of the trial — but the DOJ has rebuffed the idea.
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"I suspect ... that even if Trump’s team does file such a motion [to set aside the verdict], it would almost certainly fail," wrote Rubin. "And that’s not because of the now-standard GOP refrain that Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over the case, is impermissibly conflicted and/or biased against Trump. Rather, it’s because the evidence collected and then presented at trial by the DA was not only extensive, but was interwoven together by the DA’s team to devastating effect."
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Rubin is confident of this, she added, because she attended the trial and saw more than 400 slides of evidence and arguments that Bragg showed the jury.
"Collectively, the slides illustrate the breadth and depth of the DA’s evidence," wrote Rubin. "From his own words, whether written or recorded, and his signature, on the one hand, to his pattern of phone calls right as other significant developments and communications unfolded, it was the weight and quality of the evidence that did Trump in with the 12 jurors. The slides also highlight how to the extent that others helped ensure Trump’s current fate, those others are not named Alvin Bragg or Matthew Colangelo. They are David Pecker and Hope Hicks, two of Trump’s closest allies once upon a time and people whose affection for him is still palpable, even through just a cold read of the trial transcript."
The slides hardly break new ground, concluded Rubin — however, "as Trump confronts his first post-trial deadline to contest the verdict, they are nonetheless a powerful reminder of how the person Trump should most blame for his current predicament is Trump himself."