Professor Richard Epstein at the Hoover Institution, speaking at NYU to law students, speaking through

receive Chicago to law students, and now we speak to all of us amateurs about a headline in the

Wall Street Journal. The old Trump indicted by Manhattan Grand Jury, subhead cases first time a

former president has faced criminal charges. Professor, we just have a few minutes here, and you have

a spoken of this already in your libertarian podcast, and I wanted to go to one detail

among all the others, is that this is a city prosecutor, Alvin Bragg, bringing a case against

a federal officer for what I understand eventually involves a federal crime, violating campaign laws.

Is there precedent for that? Well, I asked myself the same question. The way this case is

shaking now, is there supposed to be harsh money payments made improperly, which is a

misdemeanor in the New York law that gets you to your statute of limitations, but no will.

They have six-year statute of limitations that they could make in the felony,

so they're trying to add in a federal case for campaign violation, and to do that in order to

extend the time. So the question I asked myself is, so forget about the statute of limitations

question, assume that this was something that was brought by a city prosecutor back in 2016,

two weeks after the event had taken place. The clear response at that time would be, wait a second,

this is a federal crime to be dealt with by federal prosecutor, and it's not as though they have

first crack at going at this somebody. They are the only people who can prosecute the federal

crime. There was a recent conference over whether or not a district court judge could appoint

private prosecutors when the federal government did not prosecute. The court regrettably,

in the second service said, good, but it's clear under separation of powers principle that only

federal officials can enforce federal law. And I think that's true whether or not it's an ad

on campaign or an original campaign. So I think on the face of it, this is simply wrong.

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