


Judge Juan Merchan and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg on Tuesday kicked the can one week on the so-called “Trump hush money” case; their next step should be to void the whole thing.
In a better world, they’d would apologize for ever entertaining it, admit it was always bogus, toss the verdicts and promise never to abuse the law this way again.
Even without the Supreme Court ruling that calls much of it into question, the legal flaws were huge: The charges relied on 1) finding Trump had committed some other crime that no authority ever charged, and 2) using that to morph bookkeeping moves that at most would be a misdemeanor (on which the statute of limitations had already lapsed) into a felony.
Not to mention how it was about actions in 2017 somehow interfering in the 2016 election.
Plus, Merchan told the jurors to make up their own individual minds as to which of three different federal (or state!) violations Trump had committed, with no need to even agree on what “crime” he’d committed.
The only real point ever was to get a guilty verdict to license Democrats to spend the campaign damning Trump as a “convicted felon” — though it failed to convince enough voters to stop him from winning bigly last Tuesday.
If Merchan and Bragg try to keep it up, they’re likely to see the case tossed on appeal anyway, and find themselves at war with the incoming president of the United States.
The prudent course is to drop the whole thing; to save face, they can blame the Supremes for changing the rules on them and Bragg can even posture that he’s saving taxpayer money by not pursuing a case that the high court has made too hard to win.
Whatever: End this farce now, gents, before you embarrass yourselves and the whole city any further.