Former President Donald Trump was convicted Thursday on 34 charges for a crime that no one can clearly articulate, in a case experts on both sides of the aisle have dubbed “ill-conceived” and “unjustified.” But Trump’s real crime was winning the 2016 election — and the show trial in Manhattan was the culmination of the election denialism left-wing sycophants have spent the past eight years spreading.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg alleged that Trump reimbursed his then-lawyer Michael Cohen for payments Cohen made to pornographer Stormy Daniels to suppress negative publicity about an affair Daniels claimed to have had with Trump. The alleged wrongdoing, according to Bragg, is that the payments to his lawyer should have been classified as campaign expenses rather than legal expenses. There is nothing illegal about nondisclosure agreements or purchasing negative press. But Bragg claims Trump “orchestrated a scheme with others to influence the 2016 presidential election by identifying and purchasing negative information about him to suppress its publication and benefit the Defendant’s electoral prospects.”
In order to make the payment sound more sinister — and to twist an alleged bookkeeping offense into 34 felonies — prosecutors suggested the payment to Daniels was part of a murky plot to steal the 2016 election. Biden’s Department of Justice’s former No. 3, Matthew Colangelo, said during opening statements of the trial that “this was a planned, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected through illegal expenditures to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior.”
“It was election fraud, pure and simple,” Colangelo continued, according to PBS News. “The defendant, Donald Trump, orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. Then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by lying in his New York business records over and over and over again.”
This All Stems From the Phony Russia-Collusion Hoax
Democrats accusing Trump of a conspiracy to steal the 2016 election might sound familiar.
To add insult to injury, the original “evidence” used by Bragg’s team to wage a lawfare campaign against the former president “came from an FBI raid conducted after Special Counsel Robert Mueller referred the matter to the Southern District of New York,” as independent journalist Matt Taibbi pointed out. “Mueller’s investigation, remember, grew out of the FBI’s dubious Crossfire Hurricane investigation,” Taibbi added.
In 2016, Clinton campaign lawyers enlisted the help of oppo research firm Fusion GPS to get dirt on Trump. Fusion GPS then used the funding to hire British spy Christopher Steele, who put his name on the so-called “Steele dossier” which had uncorroborated allegations that Trump was a Russian asset. The primary source for the dossier was Igor Danchenko, who was actually tied to Russian intelligence and was later indicted for lying to the FBI.
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As The Federalist’s Margot Cleveland explained, Danchenko “fed Steele false information about the Trump campaign, which a Clinton booster had invented and then passed on to Danchenko.”
The FBI then used this dossier as a pretense for illegally spying on the Trump campaign in what became known as Crossfire Hurricane.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller, who found no evidence that the Trump campaign conspired with Russian operatives, referred a matter regarding Cohen to the Southern District of New York. The FBI raided Cohen’s home in April of 2018, “in search of documents related to the hush-money payment” as well as other documents pertaining to different matters, as Bloomberg reported.
But the connection between the Russia collusion hoax and the Manhattan trial goes deeper than the origins of the evidence. Democrats have been reeling for eight years that Americans preferred Trump over Clinton, who has called Trump’s presidency “illegitimate” ever since her defeat. President Joe Biden likewise spread the claim, telling a woman in 2019 who referred to Trump as an “illegitimate president” that he “absolutely” agreed with her.
Democrats’ inability to accept the results of the 2016 election culminated in the invention of the latest hoax — that Trump “stole” the election by paying for a non-disclosure agreement.
Brianna Lyman is an elections correspondent at The Federalist.
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