This is a Cato special podcast. I'm Caleb Brown. Former president and current

presidential candidate Donald Trump has been found guilty on 34

counts related to falsifying business records to

conceal certain crimes.

Cato's Clark Neely says it's the case of a sleazy politician crashing into a deeply

broken system for delivering justice.

Clark, we had such great plans for this podcast recording,

and we will reserve them for another time.

Give me your general sense of one this case, the quality of the case and this conviction.

It's difficult to get your head around it, right?

So this is the first time in the history of this country that a former president of the United States

has been charged with a crime

let alone convicted as Donald Trump was yesterday on all 34 counts in the

New York case that sometimes described as the hush money case it's important to be a little more precise than that.

It was really a case about falsifying business records

with the intent to either conceal or facilitate another crime.

That's specifically what turned the misdemeanor record falsification

charges into felonies. And I think one way to try to summarize it in one sentence would be to say, were we essentially had ringside seats at a

spectacle where one of the most unethical sleeseest people in the country came

into direct collision with an unbelievably cynical and pathological criminal justice system

and it's really hard to know who to feel sorry for and who to root for here.

On the technical matter of the charges against him, it seemed as if prosecutors

...