There have been rumors floating out there for at least a few days that there will be more than 30 charges in the alleged Trump indictment. Now there’s a more formal report out, claiming that there will be 34 charges, and that they’re all felonies.
Donald Trump will be placed under arrest on Tuesday and informed that he has been charged with 34 felony counts for falsification of business records, according to a source who has been briefed on the procedures for the arraignment of the former president.
A New York City Police arrest report summarizing the charges against Trump will then be prepared and entered into the court system before he is led into a courtroom to be formally arraigned on the charges, none of which are misdemeanors.
They’re also saying there won’t be any handcuffs or a mugshot. This confirms what I wrote the other day, that CNN was flipping out that such things could make Trump stronger and they’re beginning to think this is backfiring on them.
But I want to re-up my comments from Saturday when I said this “charge stacking” is likely what would happen. Prosecutors can try to charge as many things as they can, even if those charges only pertain to one incident. So let’s assume for the moment in this alleged “falsification of business records” charge, that Trump had to file a form that had signatures or initials on the same form multiple times. Each signature/initial could be counted as a potential charge, even if it’s all on the same form and just one incident. So if you had a 34-page form with signatures or initials on each page, you could potentially make 34 charges out of it. We’ll know when we see the real indictment to see precisely what they are talking about. It’s also a bit of flooding of the jury, all they would have to agree to is one to convict. This increases that possibility.
But I think this is mostly about making Trump look bad to the public and the potential jury pool. It’s about having people go “34 charges!!!” and say how awful Trump is, when it all may apply just to the one matter. It’s trying to make the turkey of a case look like it’s something more than it is by buffaloing people with the number. I think it’s more evidence of the bias in this matter, as this shows Bragg trying to throw everything and anything against the wall to try to make something stick when what he truly has is a legally pathetic case.
Then the report says that they’re Class E felonies. That’s the lowest felony. As we noted, he’s already may be bootstrapping this matter by taking what would be a misdemeanor ordinarily and trying to make it a felony. But that raises questions about how he’s charging that, if it’s truly a federal crime (and thus not properly charged here in New York), and if there are statute of limitations issues that he’s trying to get around in this endeavor. As I wrote, Trump’s attorney has already said he’s going to move to have the case dismissed. Those issues and others may factor into any such motion, depending on what the indictment shows on Tuesday.
If this is all predicated on one incident/action, the charges would probably run concurrently, even if he was convicted, which would mean they would be served at the same time. So if you got a year as a sentence for each charge, you would only serve one year in total if they ran concurrently. And as a first offender on for a Class E felony, he could theoretically face one and a half to four years, but generally, you would not get that, as the Yahoo report notes. “No one gets jail time for that as a first offender,” said a New York law enforcement official.
https://redstate.com/nick-arama/2023/04/04/those-34-charges-against-trump-may-not-be-what-they-seem-n725992