Judge Merchan Bars ‘The Rolls-Royce Of Witnesses’ From Testifying In Trump’s Defense

Former President Donald Trump’s legal team was slated to call on a former commissioner of the Federal Election Commission to testify in the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Donald Trump, but the expert’s testimony was not heard after Judge Juan Merchan significantly curbed the scope of what he was allowed to discuss.

“Judge Merchan has so restricted my testimony that defense has decided not to call me. Now, it’s elementary that the judge instructs the jury on the law, so I understand his reluctance,” former FEC Commissioner Bradley Smith wrote in an X post on Monday.

“But the Federal Election Campaign Act is very complex. Even Antonin Scalia – a pretty smart guy, even you hate him – once said ‘this [campaign finance] law is so intricate that I can’t figure it out.’ Picture a jury in a product liability case trying to figure out if a complex machine was negligently designed, based only on a boilerplate recitation of the general definition of ‘negligence.’ They’d be lost without knowing technology & industry norms,” he continued.

Trump has previously referred to Smith as the “Rolls-Royce” of experts in his filled, though he was ultimately not called on by the former president’s legal team after Judge Merchan placed significant restrictions on what he could discuss before the court. While Smith would have been permitted to discuss the basic definitions surrounding election law, he was not permitted to expand beyond that scope.

Smith served as an FEC commissioner and chair between 2000 and 2005. The agency is tasked with enforcing campaign finance laws. Trump’s legal team had hoped that his testimony would shed light light on prosecutors’ allegations that Trump falsified business records, a misdemeanor that Bragg upgraded to a felony using COVID-era guidelines.

In a follow-up post, Smith noted that Bragg’s “star witness” Michael Cohen was able to go “on at length about whether and how his activity violated” the Federal Election Campaign Act (FECA), he was barred from going beyond the basics. This, according to smith, has “effectively” created a situation where the jury is hearing about FECA law from Michael Cohen.

On Monday, Smith spoke with the Washington Examiner and discussed what he would have said if he were allowed to give his full testimony.

“Judges instruct the juries on the law,” Smith told the outlet. “And they don’t want a battle of competing experts saying here’s what the law is. They feel it’s their province to make that determination. The problem, of course, is that campaign finance law is extremely complex and just reading the statute to people isn’t really going to help them very much.”

The former FEC commissioner further explained that he intended to “lay out the ways the law has been interpreted in ways that might not be obvious” while nothing that election laws are very complicated.

“You read the law, and it says that anything intended for the purpose of influencing an election is a contribution or an expenditure,” Smith said. “But that’s not in fact the entirety of the law. There is the obscure, and separate from the definitional part, idea of personal use, which is a separate part of the law that says you can’t divert campaign funds to personal use. That has a number of specific prohibitions, like you can’t buy a country club membership, you can’t normally pay yourself a salary or living expenses, you can’t go on vacation, all these kinds of things. And then it includes a broader, general prohibition that says you can’t divert [campaign funds] to any obligation that would exist even if you were not running for office.”

“We would have liked to flag that exception for the jury and talk a little bit about what it means,” he continued. “And also, we would have talked about ‘for the purpose of influencing an election’ is not a subjective test, like, ‘What was my intention?’ It’s an objective test.”

Both the Department of Justice and the FEC had declined to bring charges against Trump in connection with the payments to Daniels before Bragg performed legal jiu-jitsu to bring 34 felony charges just before the 2024 election.

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