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Harry SiegelNew York Daily News

Before everywhere had been mapped, the places past the end of the known world would often be illustrated with monsters.

On one 16th-century globe, the sea off the coast of East Asia bears the inscription: Hic Sunt Dracones.

Whats happening now is off of the map, yet somehow on a potential collision course with Albany, New York, of all godforsaken places.

Of course, there was big news this past week from New Yorks justice system.

Democrats are in a mid-level appeals court contesting last years decision from the states top court to reject the maps theyd drawn to protect their own seats and replace them with maps drawn to give voters more say.

Thats happening as the Court of Appeals which, bizarrely enough, is New Yorks top court while the so-called Supreme Court is its main trial court is without a chief judge or a tie-breaking seventh vote after an unprecedented rejection of Democratic Gov. Hochuls nominee by Democratic lawmakers.

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Oh, and word leaked out on Thursday evening that a Manhattan grand jury has indicted Donald Trump.

Tabloid-friendly loudmouth lowlife son of a rich man, among other things, who made his bones as a New York real estate guy, then a reality TV guy and then you cant make this stuff up! president of the United States, and is now the first one ever to subsequently face criminal charges.

The case of The People of the State of New York against Donald J. Trump is still sealed, but reportedly contains more than 30 counts even as hes running for president again.

Surely, none of those charges will have anything to do with the calls the then president made to officials in Georgia, which has its own local grand jury convened, to try and pressure them into finding the votes he needed to flip the state and steal a second term.

Nor will the charges be tied to the special counsel who has a federal grand jury in Washington looking into Trumps efforts before leaving office to overturn the election he lost, along with the classified government documents he took with him to Mar-a-Lago.

Instead, New Yorks case is reportedly centered on the $420,000 that Trumps former fixer Michael Cohen got paid by the Trump Organization after fronting $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence during the 2016 election about sleeping with the Donald a decade earlier, just after Melania had given birth to their son.

Thats an alleged misdemeanor, for falsifying business records, that the feds and the previous Manhattan district attorney had both decided not to charge, and where the statute of limitations seemed to have passed.

New DA Alvin Bragg, however, evidently thinks he can resurrect that zombie case and win a felony conviction against Trump through the novel legal theory that the hush money was, in fact, an unreported campaign donation.

Talk about a jury-rigged, haha, legal theory.

That term, by the way, is an old piece of sailors slang for something cobbled together from whatevers available. Natch!

Back to Albany, the famous line about how DAs could get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich came from a 1985 Daily News interview with the states newly appointed chief judge a few years before he ended up in prison himself for trying to blackmail his lover while threatening her daughter.

About 40 years and a million New York scandals later the question now is if Bragg can get a judge to let him present his theory, and then get 12 Manhattan jurors to convict Trump on it, and then get the states appeals courts to stand by that conviction.

If any of that doesnt happen, Trump will scream about total vindication.

In the meantime, he will scream about the politicization of the states courts and its mostly elected judges who in practice are generally selected by each countys dominant political party.

Trump is a terrible, terribly guilty person on lots of counts but its not going to be hard for him to argue, in court and in the court of public opinion, that this is selective prosecution.

And, really, what other kind of prosecution of a former president can there possibly be?

(Trump may also argue, as John Edwards successfully did when he was prosecuted by the feds after supporters of his presidential campaign paid his mistress $1 million to keep quiet, that he was merely hiding his affair from his family.)

Well know soon enough how Bragg makes his case. Whatever it ends up, bet on future presidents however un-Trumpy getting subpoenas from local prosecutors who identify with the other party.

We are in uncharted waters.

Harry Siegel (harrysiegel@gmail.com) is an editor at The City and a columnist for the Daily News.

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Democrats in uncharted waters with selective prosecution of Trump ... - Press of Atlantic City