Former President Donald Trump's historic indictment Thursday was ripped by one legal scholar as "legally pathetic" and a "raw political prosecution."
"This indictment, if it is reportedly following the theory that we've been talking about, is political. It's a raw political prosecution," George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley said on "Special Report."
Trump was indicted by a New York grand jury Thursday and became the first ex-president to face criminal charges in U.S. history.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg's office was investigating Trump for an alleged hush money payment of $130,000 to adult film actress Stormy Daniels in 2016. The specific charges in the case are currently under seal.
"The indictment may come out with a crime that none of us have heard of," Turley said. "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," he 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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Federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York opted out of charging Trump related to the Stormy Daniels payment in 2019 and the Federal Election Commission also tossed its investigation into the matter in 2021.
Turley said Bragg couldn't have pick a better jurisdiction in the case against Trump.
"If he's using the bootstrap theory, which is the only one that's been discussed publicly, that is unprecedented. And I expect that New York judges will have the same reaction of many of us, including people on the left, that this doesn't read right," he explained.
"This is not... under Bragg's theory, he could take any unproven federal crime and revive a long dead misdemeanor and turn it into a felony. That's going to really, you know, raise concerns for a number of judges. But once it gets to the appellate level, he's going to have a particularly difficult time, in my view."
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Trump released a statement calling the indictment a case of "political persecution" and "election interference at the highest level in history."
"Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace," he said. "Rather than stopping the unprecedented crime wave taking over New York City, he’s doing Joe Biden’s dirty work, ignoring the murders and burglaries and assaults he should be focused on."
