For now, however, I’ll wrap up with the problems with the indictment itself. It is simultaneously too much and too little. The “too much” part is how Bragg stretches eleven installment payments of reimbursement for a single debt into 34 separate felonies. Counts One through Four of the indictment present an especially egregious example of overcharging. On February 14, 2017 (a date doubtless chosen by Trump and Cohen because they are such hopeless romantics about porn-star-affair hush money), Cohen sent Trump an invoice, and Trump wrote him a check, which was recorded in two places in the Detail General Ledger for the Donald J. Trump Revocable Trust. Bragg charges this as four separate felonies: one for the invoice, one for the check, and one for each of the ledger entries. I’m surprised he didn’t charge Trump in a separate count for every zero on the check.

Andy McCarthy explains why this kind of overcharging, in addition to creating a misleading picture of pervasive criminality for the public, also presents an unfair risk that the jury will “compromise” and only convict Trump on a few of the charges, even though they are basically all the same crime. Also, there are rules, both constitutional and statutory, against doing this sort of thing, and Bragg is at serious risk of violating them. Under the double-jeopardy clause of the Constitution, you cannot be charged twice for the same crime. It has been recognized since the Supreme Court’s decision in Blockburger v. United States, (1932), that double jeopardy is at issue not only when the same defendant faces successive prosecutions for the same crime, but also in how indictments pile up multiple charges. The Blockburger rule is that two crimes are the same if they depend upon proof of all the same elements. There are two mirror-image problems under Blockburger: duplicity and multiplicity.