be indicted. there s huge ramifications. andy mccarthy is here on the trump case and what happens next. first to bryan llenas in new york city. high, bryan. hi, martha. yeah, this is a pretty interesting information coming out. brooks singman confirming that trump has hired a new lead counsel, todd blanche. he was recently a partner at a law firm a top white collar attorney. he was a former u.s. assistant attorney in the manhattan u.s. attorney s office. he will leads the charge in defending the former president here today when the former president surrenders himself to manhattan criminal courthouse behind me. more about todd blanche. he represented paul manafort, the former trump campaign manager. not only did he represent manafort, he successfully represented him, getting state charges that were filed by then cyrus vance, the district attorney of manhattan dropped. he hat state charges including mortgage fraud and a dozen other charges dropped against paul manafort arguin
of not using the criminal justice system to go after our former presidents or to go after any of the candidates for the presidency of our major political parties. i think that s a grave political mistake. it just makes our own legal and political system much more unstable than it was before bragg launched this investigation. martha: so how do you see this playing out? you ve pointed out how tenuous this is in terms of the legal legs that it stand on in the first place. so at this point, you have a grand jury indictment. a grand jury can indict a ham sandwich. the bar is very low. all they have to do as a body is say, well, there s a chance that these charges might have merit, right? that s essentially the bar here. yeah, the bar is very low for a grand jury, for example. the other side doesn t show up.
so when d.a. bragg attempts to use this misdemeanor just as a platform to get at this campaign finance violation, which is the payment of $130,000 in hush money to stephanie clifford, he s actually seizing from the federal government its right to decide whether and how to enforce the law. the supreme court has said, new york officials, state officials are not allowed to do that. the supreme court has told arizona, for example, that they can t use a misdemeanor law to enforce federal immigration laws because they feel the federal government isn t enforcing them. the federal government here in new york already prosecuted this case. they went after michael cohen. they didn t think charges against former president trump could be made or if it was in the public interest to bring them. in exchange for that, we re going to violate a 235-year norm
bragg is best looked at as a progressive democrat rather than a law enforcement official, this is good politics for him to bring the case. maybe not necessarily good policy for the democratic party. i don t like the idea of a weak case being brought in new york, which allows trump to say the whole thing is a democratic party persecution and abuse of law enforcement power. for bragg s political situation, this is very appealing to the constituency he has in manhattan. he ran on going after trump. the bottom line, i m afraid, for a certain breed of progressive democrat, it doesn t matter how this case comes out in the end. they want prop trump prosecuted. they wants him as put through
that reportedly are in this indictment. if the early reporting is accurate on this and of course that could change when we see it tomorrow, but if the early reporting is accurate, it s that most of them are misdemeanors, which is what this whole case was. a misdemeanor case that was not pursued by the federal election committee. it was not pursued by the feds. bragg decided to reopen this border and go through it. he hired a former doj attorney to come back and dig into it as well. low and behold, he came forward this grand jury that was charged with taking a look at this case and we saw a number of witnesses who testified to this grand jury and then indeed the indictment. we ve got news that there was an indictment on this last week. we will see tomorrow morning the president of the united states, the former president of the united states indicted in a manhattan courtroom.