The Trump administration’s criminal fraud charges against the anti-hate group watchdog the Southern Poverty Law Center are haphazardly conceived and doomed to failure, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told MS NOW’s Ari Melber on Thursday.
“Let’s start there,” said Melber, himself a lawyer by training. “Your view of the case legally. And if it doesn’t have legal merit, what is it?”
“This has all the hallmarks of being a spectacularly failed indictment,” said Weissmann.
“It is a speaking indictment where the government presumably is putting its best foot forward, where if it has good evidence and key evidence, you would expect to see it there,” Weissmann continued. “And this is what is missing from the core allegations in the indictment. The theory of the fraud that’s charged is that the donors to the Southern Poverty Law Center were told that they would be giving money for Purposes A, and in fact, that those purposes were not A. In other words, that they were told that this money would not be going to, for instance, doing this sort of undercover work. And in fact, the money was being used to go for this undercover work.”
“Here’s the problem,” he said. “That’s not what the indictment alleges. And there’s not a single piece of evidence cited for any donor being specifically told the methodology that the Southern Poverty Law Center would engage in. In other words, if there was a fraud, you need to have some specific statement that was told to the southern poverty law center donors. That was then proved to be not just false, but a lie. And here there isn’t even a specific statement that’s alleged to be false that was made to a donor.”
“One of the things … I would have expected is, where’s the evidence that any owner has told the government that they were misled, that they were told and given a specific promise as to how their money would be used?” said Weissmann. “I contrast this a lot with the We Build The Wall case, where Steve Bannon and others were charged and convicted because they’re, the donors were alleged to have been told, and then it was proved up that none of the money would be going to such things as salaries or private costs that were being. And it was being funneled off to Steve Bannon and other executives. And that, in fact, was what the government could show, which was that the donors were told that A, but it was used for Not A.”
“That’s what’s missing here, so I really can’t imagine that the government has that proof, but they just somehow forgot to put that into the indictment,” he added.
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