Noah Feldman, Columnist

Trump Indictment Is a Risky Bet for New York and the Nation

Prosecuting Trump for hush-money payments now makes it tougher to charge him with the much more serious crime of election interference.

April 4, 2023 at 9:10 PM UTC

By Noah Feldman

Noah Feldman is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A professor of law at Harvard University, he is author, most recently, of “To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People."

Former US president Donald Trump arrives ahead of his arraignment at the Manhattan Criminal Court in New York on April 4, 2023.
Photographer: Angela Weiss/AFP/Getty Images

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The criminal indictment of former president and current presidential candidate Donald Trump is historic and unprecedented. It stands for the principle that, in the United States, no one is above the law.

At the same time, from the perspective of protecting US democracy, the indictment is poorly timed. It would have been far better for the stability of our democracy if Trump had first been charged with crimes connected to his attempts to subvert that democracy by pressuring Georgia election officials to find more votes, not to mention interfering with the transfer of power on and around January 6, 2021. If prosecutors in different jurisdictions consider it improper to confer with each other on timing, then Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg should have waited for others to move first.