OUR VIEWS Editorial Cartoon Nassau exec has no place in N.Y. DA’s biz

Perhaps Nassau County Executive Bruce Blakeman is clairvoyant.

Maybe he can read the future and, more importantly, see the contents of a sealed indictment miles away in New York City before it is fled.

How else to explain Blakeman’s calling the indictment against former President Trump on 34 felony counts “political and malicious prosecution” — fve days before it was announced by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Unless, of course, Blakeman, who served as the Nassau County Republican Party’s liaison to Trump’s political campaign in 2020, did not know the contents of the indictment. That he blasted Bragg without having the facts.

Which raises the question of why?

Manhattan prosecutors accused Trump of orchestrating a hush-money scheme to pave his path to the presidency and then covering it up from the White House. In at least one case, from the Oval Ofce.

The charges against Trump trace a $130,000 hush-money payment to his fxer, Michael Cohen, made to porn star Stormy Daniels in the fnal days of the 2016 presidential campaign.

The payment, which Cohen said he made at Trump’s direction, suppressed her story of an alleged sexual liaison with Trump.

Cohen was repaid by Trump’s company, which is alleged to have falsely classifed the payments as legal expenses.

The result: 11 counts involving the checks repaying Cohen, 11 monthly invoices Cohen submitted to the company and 12 entries in the Trump Organization’s general ledger reporting the payments to Cohen as legal expenses.

Prosecutors said the payments to Daniels were part of a broader scheme to infuence the 2016 presidential election by having the National Enquirer purchase damaging stories about him to keep them hidden from voters. The alleged scheme includes an afair Trump had with a Playboy model. Trump denies being involved with either woman.

Bragg, a Democrat, said the indictment was a matter of treating Trump the way his ofce treats everyone else and that the charges were routinely made by his ofce.

“Everyone stands equal under the law,” Bragg said at the press conference after Trump’s arraignment. “No amount of money and no amount of power” changes that, he added.

Perhaps Blakeman believes otherwise. Perhaps he believes the rich and the powerful should be treated diferently.

Or there should be a diferent standard for a former president or a presidential candidate. Despite the indictment and three other criminal probes underway, Trump is currently the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president.

Would the same rules apply to a senator, governor or county executive?

This would seem to be a very dangerous idea.

Under a Justice Department ruling, sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted while in ofce.

If they cannot be prosecuted after ofce, this would give presidents and presidential candidates a get-out-of-jail card for all sorts of criminal activity. Talk about a bad incentive.

Perhaps Blakeman believes the charges against Trump were not serious enough to warrant an indictment against a former president and current candidate.

The charges of falsifying business records qualify as a felony rather than a misdemeanor only if Trump’s “intent to defraud” included an efort to commit or conceal a second crime.

It is unclear whether Bragg has settled on the second crime. In his news conference, he mentioned a number of potential underlying crimes, including state and federal election law violations and intent to commit tax fraud.

But even if the charges are found to be misdemeanors, Bragg said his ofce – located in the world’s fnancial capital — has for decades routinely prosecuted charges of making false claims in books and records, often against powerful, high-profle individuals

Do we really want to allow execu-

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E-mail: tives at fnancial frms to falsify their records? After watching the entire banking system recently threatened by runs at two banks?

Bragg was harshly and rightly criticized by Republicans and some Democrats after he took ofce in January 2021 and said his ofce would no longer prosecute low-level ofenses such as subway-fare evasion, resistance to arrest or prostitution unless they were part of an accompanying felony charge.

Lee Zeldin, the Republican former congressman who ran unsuccessfully against Gov. Kathy Hochul, promised during the campaign to remove Bragg from ofce for not prosecuting low-level misdemeanors.

So now we don’t want to prosecute Trump for white-collar fnancial misdemeanors but we do want to prosecute poor people for subway-fare evasion?

Blakeman also implied that Bragg had rushed the charges against Trump for political purposes, saying if he were to rush an indictment of a political enemy to Nassau County District Attorney Anne Donnelly, she would “throw me out of her ofce.”

We are happy to hear that Blakeman does not plan to rush into Donnelly’s offce with charges against a political opponent, but who does he believe rushed charges into Bragg, a prosecutor elected by the voters of Manhattan? Which

Blakeman is not.

The better question is what is a county executive from Nassau County doing pressuring a Manhattan district attorney in a case in which, at the time he made his comments, he did not have the facts?

And the case brought by Bragg was not rushed. It was fve years in the making following a Wall Street Journal report on the deal between Cohen and Daniels a year after Trump was elected president.

In the summer of 2018, Cohen pleaded guilty to federal campaign fnance charges brought by Trump appointees in the Southern District of New York related to the hush-money payments to Daniels on Trump’s behalf.

Cohen received a three-year prison sentence for the hush-money payments and other charges, spending 13 months in prison and the rest of the sentence under house arrest.

The federal prosecutors never charged Trump but revealed in court papers that Cohen acted “in coordination with and at the direction of” Trump.

Why didn’t U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland charge Trump after he left ofce is a good question that has yet to be answered.

Also unanswered is why Bragg’s critics did not complain about Cohen doing time for things prosecutors said were done at Trump’s direction.

Cohen’s case did spur former Manhattan DA Cyrus R. Vance Jr. to open an investigation into the then-president and his business, the Trump Organization. Vance did not run for re-election and he left ofce at the end of 2021. Bragg inherited the case but grew concerned about whether they could prove it. Weeks into his tenure, he halted the presentation before a grand jury, prompting the resignation of two senior prosecutors.

One of the prosecutors, Mark Pomeranz said in a book and public comments that Trump should have been charged then with crimes.

Bragg continued the investigation and by summer his prosecutors returned to the hush-money payment. In January, he impaneled a new grand jury.

The frst witness was David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, the tabloid that helped broker the deal between Cohen and Daniels and bought the story of the Playboy model and a doorman who falsely claimed Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock.

So much for someone rushing into Bragg’s ofce and pressuring him to indict Trump.

Blakeman is not alone among Republicans in criticizing Bragg before,

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