Former U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said that the Manhattan probe into alleged hush money payment by former President Donald Trump's former lawyer is not unprecedented.
Bharara, speaking on NBC's Meet the Press on Sunday, decried calls that the probe is unprecedented by citing Michael Cohen's guilty plea in 2018.
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“We had, you know, a melange of Republicans saying, ‘No crime here. Nobody would ever charge this case. It’s unseemly. It’s irrational. It’s never happened before.’ But it did. It happened with respect to Michael Cohen, who was not only charged with this type of crime, this particular crime, and he thought it was a crime, pled guilty to it, His lawyer thought it was a crime, allowed him to plead guilty to it. The prosecutors in the Southern District of New York thought it was a crime. The judge accepted the guilty plea, thought it was a crime,” Bharara said.
"So you can argue about whether or not it’s appropriate to bring such a case. You can argue about the optics of it. But the idea that this is unprecedented is just false. It’s just wrong," Bharara added.
He said it is a "provable case" but also noted that there are challenges with the case, including with the creditability of Cohen. Bharara also claimed that Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg is being "careful and deliberative" in how he has handled the Trump probe.
“This is the mark of someone who is careful and deliberative, and we can have an argument about the merits and strengths of the case once we see an indictment with respect to the campaign finance part of it, but you can’t say about Alvin Bragg that he’s rushing to the court to indict a former president on flimsy charges,” Bharara said.
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Prosecutors in New York City have been investigating to see if Trump had falsified business records by listing a $130,000 reimbursement of his then-lawyer Cohen for paying off porn star Stormy Daniels to stay silent as a legal expense in 2016 when he was running for president.
An indictment of Trump by the Manhattan grand jury could come as soon as this week after it was widely speculated that he would be charged last week.