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CNN Senior Legal Analyst Tears Into Judge Over This Aspect of the Trump Trial

Matt Vespa
Matt Vespa  |  June 01, 2024 9:30 PM

 CNN’s Elie Honig penned a damning article about the Trump hush money trial, though trying to walk the tightest of tightropes here. He claims the jury did its job but elaborated further on this trainwreck of a case. Former President Donald Trump was found guilty of all 34 counts, though what he was precisely guilty of remains a whole other matter, which Honig noted in New York Magazine and on the air. 

Honig is a former assistant US Attorney, a friend of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, and Trump’s defense lawyer Todd Blanche. Still, the one area he took Bragg to task for is the “other crime” aspect concerning the basis of this trial. Hush money isn’t either a state or federal crime. Bragg’s team argued that the payments and repayments had to be made by falsifying business records. That’s a misdemeanor charge, which Bragg infamously elevated to felony status based on these falsified records created to commit some other crime. 

As a former prosecutor, he elaborated that attorneys on his side of the aisle during these proceedings are pushing the limits of due process. The jury instruction phase “blew” Honig’s mind, which was the reluctance to elaborate on the “other crime” that served as the basis for Bragg’s case against Trump. Only during closing arguments was this revealed, which is where the due process concern rests. As he put it, Trump is guilty of a charge that “falls within the same technical criminal classification as shoplifting a Snapple and a bag of Cheetos from a bodega.”