After seven weeks at trial, longtime Trump ally Tom Barrack was acquitted today of all charges against him regarding the allegation he acted as an unregistered foreign lobbyist for the United Arab Emirates.
Why?
There are three main reasons I believe that the jury acquitted Barrack and his young associate Matthew Grimes.
The first is that the law at hand—Section 951, which emanates out of the Cold War period—is poorly written and basically unenforceable.
What 951 says is that, in order to be considered an unregistered foreign agent, that person must be subject to the direction or control of a foreign power. Now, in my view, as I’ve written before, the government needed to prove its case using scenes out of James Bond movie—recordings of secret meetings in the desert and so on. And the government just did not have that evidence. Prosecutor Sam Nitze argued that they didn’t need it. But the jury, it now seems clear, felt otherwise. Even the judge at one point told the government he thought their evidence was thin, calling it “right on the line of impermissible evidence.” READ MORE.
