'Shrewd and successful' moves by Manhattan district attorney are leaving Trump beaten: experts

Former President Donald Trump faces four criminal indictments, but one of them has gone largely unremarked on in recent weeks – the business fraud case in Manhattan in which he's accused of falsifying records to obscure a hush payment to x-rated film star Stormy Daniels.

And while focus has been on the other trials, District Attorney Alvin Bragg has been quietly outmaneuvering Trump, wrote legal experts Norm Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, and Josh Kolb for MSNBC.

Bragg, noted the experts, was an unlikely figure to be the first to bring a case. His office famously was in conflict after he initially closed out an investigation into Trump without charges, with a prosecutor from his own office resigning in protest. But he revived the case, focusing on the Daniels payment — and in so doing, created a simple, easy-to-prove case that "sidestepped" the thornier issues Trump's legal team might be able to bring up had Bragg gone after anything else in his business empire.

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And if he is convicted, he could face 34 counts that each can bring up to four years in prison.

"Not only are these types of charges regarding false business records the bread and butter of the Manhattan DA’s office, but this case is also, at its heart, a democracy case," they wrote, saying the central allegation is that Trump used the payment to block news of an affair from going public during the 2016 election, depriving voters of important information.

But Bragg has done more than build a solid case, Eisen, Weissmann, and Kolb argue — he is also deftly coordinating with prosecutors in other cases, filing motions in court to time his trial in a way that won't interfere with the federal election conspiracy case brought by special counsel Jack Smith.

"This is only the latest in a series of shrewd and successful moves by Bragg that have largely gone unnoticed by the media and the public," they said. "

From the moment he took office, he has faced significant public criticism related to his handling of Trump investigations. It appeared to some (including one of the authors) that he was moving too slowly — or even tacitly deep-sixing the Trump investigation."

And he has done this all in the face of constant threats and attacks from Trump – including a post featuring an image of the former president facing down Bragg with a baseball bat – and efforts by Republicans in Congress to harass and probe his office.

"Bragg has demonstrated true statesmanship — staying the course, continuing the investigation, pushing forward in spite of external (and some internal) sniping and, ultimately, stepping aside temporarily," they concluded, adding that he has "transcended parochialism and politics, focusing only on the public good" and "deserves our thanks."