X owner Elon Musk slammed the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office’s highly controversial case against former President Donald Trump this week after the jury returned a guilty verdict.
The verdict was the culmination of a weeks-long courtroom battle in which Trump said that he was the target of a “political persecution” as he runs another campaign for a second term in the White House. The former president was found guilty on all 34 charges brought in the hush-money trial.
“Great damage was done today to the public’s faith in the American legal system,” Musk posted on X. “If a former President can be criminally convicted over such a trivial matter – motivated by politics, rather than justice – then anyone is at risk of a similar fate.”
Musk later responded to author J.K. Rowling on the site after she said that she struggled to “see why it’s a trivial matter if a billionaire falsifies their business records, though, whatever the context.”
“In a vacuum, that would be accurate and it would also not matter whe[ther] someone were a ‘billionaire’ or not (there is an implied pejorative in that word),” he said. “However, as I’m sure you’ve observed, judicial resources are limited, often leaving serious crimes, where victims were directly harmed, unprosecuted.”
“Yet there is no actual victim in this crime! It is obviously politically motivated, with the goal of undermining democracy by preventing half of America from voting for their preferred candidate,” he continued. “I have never provided financial support, nor have I voted, for Trump. My views on this matter would be the same for any candidate.”
He then posted a screenshot of a news report that showed that the prosecuting attorney, Alvin Bragg, who is backed by Democrat megadonor George Soros, downgraded 60% of felony cases in his district last year.
“Many of these were violent crimes with victims who will never fully recover,” he wrote.
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Many of these were violent crimes with victims who will never fully recover pic.twitter.com/owLLgQGYDE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) May 31, 2024
CNN’s top legal expert, Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, slammed the case in a piece on Friday, saying that just because a guilty verdict was returned does not mean justice was administered.
“Both of these things can be true at once: The jury did its job, and this case was an ill-conceived, unjustified mess,” he said. “Sure, victory is the great deodorant, but a guilty verdict doesn’t make it all pure and right. Plenty of prosecutors have won plenty of convictions in cases that shouldn’t have been brought in the first place. ‘But they won’ is no defense to a strained, convoluted reach unless the goal is to ‘win,’ now, by any means necessary and worry about the credibility of the case and the fallout later.”
In his lengthy piece, Honig noted that the judge in the case broke the law by having donated to a pro-Biden and overtly anti-Trump political operation, the district attorney who brought the case campaigned on getting Trump, the case pushed the outer limits of the law and due process, and numerous aspects of the case were crafted in a special manner just to get Trump.
“The charges against Trump are obscure, and nearly entirely unprecedented,” he said. “In fact, no state prosecutor — in New York, or Wyoming, or anywhere — has ever charged federal election laws as a direct or predicate state crime, against anyone, for anything. None. Ever. Even putting aside the specifics of election law, the Manhattan DA itself almost never brings any case in which falsification of business records is the only charge.”