“Trump actually did all these bad things! But we can’t prove any of them, so we’ll prosecute him for influencing an election by covering up an affair after he already won the election. Don’t sweat the details, you gotta get creative with these kingpins.”

This is persuasive to nobody that doesn’t start from the assumption Trump is a criminal. The irony is that I used to share that assumption, because I’m a pretty trusting person. But after almost eight years of the smartest lawyers in the country going after him, I’m not so sure. My former boss at a white shoe law firm in New York helped engineer the New York case, and it’s the same kind of contrived legal theory the firm would use to help a corporate client make it seem like all their income was earned in Bermuda. Utterly unpersuasive.