Prosecutors are off to a strong start in the Manhattan trial of Donald Trump. Their evidence is aimed at proving that the former president committed crimes by falsifying business records to cover up a pre-election payoff in 2016 meant to keep women who would have otherwise revealed some of his sexual scandals ahead of that presidential election silent.

Some critics, including some very smart legal minds who have no love for Trump, don’t like the case. Boston University Law School Professor Jed Shugerman — who previously described to Salon “Trump abuses” at the Department of Justice as “using the system of prosecution to reward your political allies and to punish your opponents” — took major issue with the first criminal case against Trump to reach trial in an April 23 New York Times guest essay:

After listening to Monday’s opening statement by prosecutors, I still think the Manhattan D.A. has made a historic mistake. Their vague allegation about “a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election” has me more concerned than ever about their unprecedented use of state law and their persistent avoidance of specifying an election crime or a valid theory of fraud.

Shugerman went on to publicly accuse prosecutors of engaging in “an embarrassment of prosecutorial ethics and apparent selective prosecution.” But if you are to call the criminal prosecution of Donald Trump for election interference a “historic mistake,” you ought to have arguments that are as close to airtight as humanly possible. The ones in Professor Shugerman’s essay, lamentably, are not even legally persuasive.

Let’s put aside his description of the prosecution’s opening statement as “vague.” That’s not how former Trump........

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