Is this the smoking gun against Donald Trump that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg has been waiting for?
There have been numerous interpretations as to why new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg hasn’t criminally indicted Donald Trump. The prosecutors who were running the case have suggested that Bragg doesn’t want to move forward with it. Bragg keeps insisting that the case is ongoing.
One popular theory is that Bragg wants the case to be more airtight before willing to take the risk of making such a big move. If that is the case, then the smoking gun against Donald Trump may have just landed at Bragg’s doorstep.
The tricky part about indicting Donald Trump for the Trump Organization’s financial crimes is that he’ll try to claim he didn’t know what his employees like Allen Weisselberg and Matthew Calamari were doing. No one truly believes that, but it could potentially work as a reasonable doubt defense at trial.
That’s why it’s such a big deal that a six month old Trump deposition from a civil suit just surfaced. The Daily Beast is reporting that in Trump’s deposition, he testified under oath that he personally had “authority” over Calamari’s Trump Organization compensation. This is a confession by Trump that he knew the Trump Organization was compensating Calamari in illegal ways, which makes Trump guilty.
So now we’ll see what Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg decides to do. Some observers suspect he’s decided to punt on indicting Donald Trump entirely, because he’d rather the New York Attorney General, or the DOJ, or the Fulton County District Attorney go first. But if Bragg has simply been hesitant because he wasn’t sure the case was airtight, Trump’s newly unearthed confession under oath sounds a lot like the smoking gun that Bragg needs.
