In the News

To arrange an interview with Professor Germain, please email Rob Conrad, College of Law Director of Communications and Media Relations.

Professor Gregory Germain recently spoke with several media outlets about the Trump criminal trial and the guilty verdict.

After conviction, Trump questioned the New York statute of limitations. Here are the facts

USA Today, June 5

Germain said he wondered whether the statute of limitations might apply to the underlying – and uncharged – crimes that made falsifying business records a felony.

“I could imagine a court saying that you can’t put together two or three” misdemeanors that are beyond the statute of limitations and turn them into a felony that hasn’t reached that time limit, he said.

Legal Face-Off

WGN 720, June 5

“It’s such a complex, convoluted case I think he has good grounds for appeal which is not to say I think what he did here was moral or ethical…but whether he broke the law in a way that isn’t barred by the statute of limitations, its very hard to find that,” says Germain.

When asked about the possibility of the case going to the U.S. Supreme Court, Germain said “I think if the judge sentences him to prison, it might get to the Supreme Court. Imprisoning one of the major candidates during an election raises difficult questions.”

Germain’s interview starts at the 1-minute mark.

Donald Trump Prison Sentence Would Create Constitutional Chaos: Experts

Newsweek, June 6

“I don’t think Trump will be given a prison sentence, because that would create a constitutional crisis and a slew of appeals and habeas corpus challenges, and a mess for the judicial system in trying to deal with prisoner Trump,” he said.

Professor David Driesen provided commentary to Newsweek’s coverage of Donald Trump’s hometown newspaper’s editorial on the unanimous verdict in the hush money trial.  The Palm Beach Post’s editorial read in part “Defendant Donald Trump is now a ‘convicted felon.’ He becomes the first former president and presumptive Republican Party presidential nominee to earn that historic but ignoble label. He now has a criminal record, a damning complication for any candidate seeking political office, much less the presidency of the United States.”

Driesen said the unanimous verdict reached by independent citizens does not in any way implicate Judge Juan Merchan or the prosecution.

“This was a fair trial,” Driesen said. “Trump’s baseless attacks on prosecutors and judges are scandalous and the willingness of many Republican politicians to back up his nonsense dangerous and despicable.”

To arrange an interview with Professor Germain, please email Rob Conrad, College of Law Director of Communications and Media Relations.

Professor Gregory Germain spoke with Spectrum News 1 in the wake of a New York jury finding Donald Trump guilty of all 34 charges in the hush money case. He provided an analysis of the charges, what can happen on appeal, possible sentencing outcomes, and his current presidential campaign.

Germain noted that “There are very difficult legal issues in this case, some of which the judge preempted them [Trump’s defense] from arguing and others they should have emphasized the fact, for example, that the business records were modified or falsified after the election. How could the records have been falsified in order to defraud the voters when the records were falsified after the election?”

On the topic of sentencing, expected for July 11, Germain said “The rules say the sentence should be between one and four years in jail, but it can be less than one year at the discretion of the judge for a first-time offender. What happens now is we get the presentencing report from the probation department making a recommendation for the sentence and I would be shocked to see any recommendation of any jail time in a case like this, in a Class E first time-felon, the lowest felony you can be charged in New York.”

In a Fox News story, Germain said observed that it was “a terribly risky strategy for Trump to focus on Michael Cohen’s credibility rather than focusing on the convoluted legal basis for the claims.”

“It’s not clear to me what they expected the jury to believe – that Michael Cohen paid $125,000 of his own money to Stormy Daniels without Trump’s knowledge and promise of reimbursement? They did not present an alternative theory that makes any sense, so of course they believed Cohen,” Germain said.

He claims that “a much better argument” would have been “that the records could not have been falsified to defraud the voters in the 2016 election because the records were falsified in 2017 after the election was over, and the records were not public or known by the public.”

To arrange an interview with Professor Germain, please email Rob Conrad, College of Law Director of Communications and Media Relations.

In this Mirror story, Professor Gregory Germain comments that “So, even though only one juror is necessary for Trump to obtain a mistrial, and even though it’s a very flawed case, I predict that the jury will convict him.” Despite this, the professor did highlight possible flaws in the prosecution’s case.

He said: “I think the DA and the Judge are fully invested in obtaining a conviction. I think the judge will gloss over the legal issues in the jury instructions to allow a conviction by defining the legal issue around the propriety of paying hush money rather than the legality of paying hush money and how that relates to the documents charges.”

Professor Germain also spoke with Al Jazeera Network, pointing to “the two essential elements” of the indictment: “Where’s the fraud and where’s the [secondary] crime?”