Intriguing report that Trump legal team believes Apprendi can require downgrading his NY criminal charges

A helpful colleague made sure I did not miss this new Daily Beast article headlined “Trump’s New Ploy to Knock the Manhattan DA’s Case Down to Misdemeanors.”  Here is how the piece starts:

When the Manhattan District Attorney finally indicted former President Donald Trump in March, Alvin Bragg made the curious decision to not detail Trump’s crimes in the official indictment — something critics seized on almost immediately to say this was an overblown case.

While previous investigators had wrestled with how to charge Trump with felonies, Bragg overcame that hurdle by essentially charging Trump with 34 misdemeanor counts of faking business records — then leveling them up to felonies in a parallel legal document.  Under New York law, faking business records is only a felony if it’s done while committing another crime.  In this case, prosecutors say Trump hid his 2016 porn star hush money payment in order to break election laws, therefore the 34 counts of taking business records become felonies.

But according to a source familiar with the Trump legal team’s internal discussions, the former president’s lawyers are now exploring how to use that otherwise ingenious move as a weakness to severely power down the case.  And Trump’s lawyers believe their new tactic could force the DA to reconsider if this is a fight worth having.  Their legal strategy all comes down to a Supreme Court case where a white guy in New Jersey got drunk and shot at a Black family’s home in 1994 — and then managed to get hate crime charges overturned.

Trump’s lawyers are eyeing the 2000 SCOTUS decision Apprendi v. New Jersey, which stressed the importance of putting in an indictment all the aspects of a crime that could enhance penalties.

Here is more:

When Trump was arraigned in criminal court in April, his defense lawyer Joe Tacopina assured reporters this case would “never” make it to trial.  And the Trump team’s new potential tactic threatens to downgrade the severity of the case before it ever reaches a jury, which could force the DA to consider whether a case full of misdemeanors justifies an expensive prosecution.

The legal precedent Trump’s team is considering is also buttressed by a 1999 Supreme Court decision, Jones v United States, which decided that “any fact other than prior conviction that increases the maximum penalty for a crime must be charged in an indictment, submitted to a jury, and proved beyond a reasonable doubt.”

If Trump’s team successfully uses that defense strategy, it would be an embarrassing defeat for Bragg, who could have just as easily put all the information about the case that was included in the “Statement of Facts” in the indictment and avoided this whole mess.