A Look at the Alvin Bragg Extravaganza, Part II
The tape of my conversation with Sarah Isgur
Last week, I noted that Sarah Isgur and I would be in a live discussion about Donald Trump’s recently concluded hush money/mislabeling prosecution in Manhattan.
Not surprisingly, Sarah was the star of the show, with a wonderfully informed, thoughtful and fair-minded take on this incendiary topic. Sarah is senior editor of The Dispatch. She received her law degree in 2008 from Harvard, where she was president of the Harvard Federalist Society and a staffer on the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. She also attended the London School of Economics and participated in their certificate program.
While in law school, Sarah served as a clerk in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Policy. She worked on Mitt Romney’s presidential political action committee and Romney’s 2008 presidential campaign. She clerked for the brilliant Judge Edith Jones on the Fifth Circuit, and more recently was Justice Department spokesman under Attorneys General Jeff Sessions and Bill Barr.
Sarah has also had an honor to which I can only aspire but will never achieve, namely, being demoted as a CNN analyst after complaints by some of its staffers and the DNC.
As many of you will know, my story is less interesting. I’m a Stanford Law graduate and an over-the-hill federal prosecutor and law professor. At one time I had the privilege of being Special White House Counsel to President George H.W. Bush.
For those who missed the original program and are interested, a tape of the Webinar Sarah and I did is now available here. Comments and criticism are welcome.
Excellent commentary by both of you. However, while I do agree that it is clearly the strongest of the cases against Trump, I would disagree on the propriety of bringing the classified documents case.
While it is true that Trump's behavior with the classified documents is significantly more egregious than Biden's or that of the many other high officials that have come to light, I think that especially when we are dealing with a former president (even one I can't stand) it should have to be shown that there actually was some threat to national security before such a case should be criminally charged. After all this is someone who (gasp!) actually was formerly the highest official in charge of our national security and classified documents. It seems to me that before that person is prosecuted criminally, where so many others aren't, there ought to have been a gloss of an actual threat to national security read into the statute Otherwise, it certainly looks like politics was a significant factor in charging the case. From what I know of the facts, there wasn't.
Sarah is sober and rational, which shows that CNN is not.