Thursday, during an appearance on Fox News Channel, law professor Jonathan Turley criticized the merits of the Manhattan grand jury’s indictment of former President Donald Trump.
Turley deemed the indictment “legally pathetic.”
“It is, it’s historic, it’s not necessarily good history that it is being made,” he said. “It’s not that I oppose the indictment of a former president. I don’t even oppose the indictment of a sitting president on a constitutional basis. But this indictment, if it is reportedly following the theory that we’ve been talking about is political. It’s a raw political prosecution. Now, the indictment may come out with a crime that none of us have heard of. But for many months, this bootstrapping theory has been put out there. This idea that you could take a misdemeanor under New York law that has expired that has a two-year statute of limitations and revive it by connecting it to a federal crime, in this case, the Federal Election violation.”
“Now, there’s a host of problems with that,” Turley continued. “First of all, it’s a federal crime the Department of Justice chose not to prosecute. Bragg’s own predecessor declined to prosecute it, but he is attempting to bootstrap that federal crime into a state case. And if that is the basis for the indictment, I think it’s rather outrageous. I think it’s legally pathetic.”
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