On Tuesday, Donald Trump was arrested, booked, and arraigned on 34 felony counts of falsifying New York State documents. Those charges stem from a payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels and rely on a novel legal theory elevating what would normally be misdemeanors (and past the statute of limitations) to felonies.

Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg addressed the case after Trump left the courthouse.

"34 felony counts of falsifying business records in the first degree."@ManhattanDA lays out the indictment against @realDonaldTrump, which he was arraigned for today and pled "Not Guilty." pic.twitter.com/FceoPqGOfs

— National Review (@NRO) April 4, 2023

This article isn’t meant to offer much in the way of commentary (rest assured, they’ll be plenty of that from me, as there has been in the past), but it’s hard to watch that and not start laughing.

Bragg does his utmost to make this sound really serious, but it’s just not. The entire premise, which the DA notes in his comments, is that Trump falsified records in pursuance of another crime, which would be not categorizing the payment to Daniels as a campaign expense. That just doesn’t add up. How do you prove why Trump made the payment? And given the DOJ didn’t pursue the case, how can Bragg be the authority on it being a crime at the federal level or not? That seems ridiculously presumptive on the prosecution’s part.

The DA also claimed that his office will not normalize “serious criminal conduct,” which is news to the rest of us given he’s made it his mission to downgrade felonies and let criminals roam free. But again, this is just politics. Nothing he says has any merit.

The broader point of Bragg’s pursuit, as evidenced by his remarks, is to make it seem like Trump was involved in some grand conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election. In reality, candidates are entitled to try to affect their own chances in an election. That’s what an election is. You do your best to suppress information that could hurt you and promote information that could help you.

That’s what makes this so disturbing. They are essentially trying to put Trump in jail over a faux notion that he had no right to keep the Stormy Daniels information out of the public eye. That Bragg is relying on a gross distortion of the law to do so only makes it worse.