James Trusty, an attorney for former President Donald Trump called his indictment an “astounding, bad moment” in U.S. history on Friday’s “CNN This Morning.”
A Manhattan grand jury voted to indict the former president over his alleged payment of $130,000 in hush money to former stripper and porn actress Stormy Daniels before the 2016 presidential election. The alleged payments would have been made to keep Daniels quiet about an alleged extramarital affair between her and Trump.
Trusty, who served as an attorney in Trump’s classified documents case, said the indictment was a political targeting of the former president.
“It is an astounding, bad moment in the history of this country,” he said. “We’ve got a completely politicized prosecution, in your last segment, you had folks who actually talked openly about CNN appearances by Alvin Bragg running his campaign for office saying ‘I will target Donald Trump.’ I mean, that is not something to gloss over lightly, that is an upside down world of criminal justice where we don’t follow evidence, we don’t act judiciously as prosecutors.”
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg promised to focus on the investigations into Trump’s business practices and keep a senior prosecutor on the case. After convicting the former president’s family company of tax fraud, he convened a new grand jury earlier this year to investigate the Daniels case.
Trusty said targeting a political opponent violates the rule of the law and defended Trump for being angry about the case.
“He has the right to be angry at political persecution, which is what this case is,” he said.
The attorney said he expects there will be several pre-trial motions to dismiss the case in the near future. He said the cases against Trump brought forth by Bragg and New York Attorney General Letitia James are “completely unprecedented and unethical,” and that his legal teams will find ways to “fight back.”
The former president slammed the indictment in a Thursday Truth Social post as a politically motivated “witch hunt.” He initially predicted his arrest in a March 18 post and called on his supporters to protest.
“Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg, who was hand-picked and funded by George Soros, is a disgrace,” Trump 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. This is how Bragg spends his time!”