Donald Trump

Jacob Sullum | 10.28.2025 5:50 PM

Five months before the 2024 presidential election, a Manhattan jury convicted Donald Trump of falsifying business records with the intent to conceal "another crime." On Monday, the president's lawyers asked a New York appeals court to overturn those convictions, arguing that they were based on fallacious legal theories, inadequate evidence, and flagrantly deficient jury instructions.

All of those arguments are compelling. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg "concocted a purported felony by stacking time-barred misdemeanors under a convoluted legal theory," Trump's 96-page appeal brief says. "This case should never have seen the inside of a courtroom, let alone resulted in a conviction."

You need not be a Trump supporter to agree with that assessment. You only have to examine the iffy logic of Bragg's case against Trump, which transformed a single hush payment into 34 state felonies.

Prior to the 2016 presidential election, Michael Cohen, then Trump's personal lawyer, paid porn star Stormy Daniels $130,000 in exchange for a nondisclosure agreement (NDA) that barred her from talking about an alleged sexual encounter with Trump at a Las Vegas hotel in 2006. As Bragg told it, the effort to keep Daniels quiet was the essence of Trump's crime.

By depriving voters of information they might have deemed........

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