No, the Pomerantz book isn’t going to derail the Manhattan DA’s prosecution of Donald Trump
Back when Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg declined to criminally indict Donald Trump last year, and prosecutor Mark Pomerantz quit in protest, it raised some serious questions. Bragg was always going to have to indict Trump eventually, if only to avoid losing reelection in Trump-hating Manhattan. But why did Bragg decline to go with Pomerantz’s case? Did Bragg truly think it was a weak one, or was Bragg just afraid of being the first to indict Trump?
Ten months later, Bragg is finally presenting a criminal case against Donald Trump to a grand jury for indictment – just as Pomerantz is releasing a book about the criminal case that Bragg previously declined to bring against Trump. This raises a new round of serious questions. The timing can’t possibly be a coincidence, right? So did Pomerantz write this book awhile back and sit on it until he learned that Bragg was finally indicting Trump, so Pomerantz could cash in on the media hoopla surrounding the indictment? Or did Bragg decide to indict Trump at this time because he found out that Pomerantz was releasing a book that would make Bragg look bad?
There’s no point in guessing which of these two scenarios is the correct one. But with Pomerantz now doing promotional interviews about the book, every reporter who interviews him should start off by directly asking him to explain the timing of his book. If Pomerantz can give a credible answer about his motivations for releasing the book at this particular time, then the claims that Pomerantz makes in his book can be taken as credible as well. If Pomerantz’s answer about his motivations for the book is a bunch of BS, then the contents of his book should also be treated as BS.
Unfortunately, the mainstream media folks interviewing Pomerantz aren’t going to ask him this question, because the reality is that they’re also busy cashing in on book deals of their own, and they don’t to tip off the public to the fact that the entire realm of politics and political analysis these days is based around everyone trying to position themselves for a book deal. After all, a perfectly executed political book deal can be worth millions of dollars.
But instead of asking Pomerantz about why his book just happens to be coming out at precisely the same time Bragg is leaking that he’s having a grand jury indict Trump, the media is taking a different approach – and one that I should have seen coming. When the folks in the mainstream media and pundit class aren’t busy chasing book deals, they’re doing the other thing that drives the industry: pushing doomsday hysteria in order to boost ratings.
Multiple talking heads on MSNBC have now floated the notion that Pomerantz’s book will derail the Manhattan DA’s current criminal case against Trump. To be clear, Trump’s lawyers will be poring over Pomerantz’s book the minute it’s released, in the hope that Pomerantz has included something that they can use to convince a judge or jury to toss out the charges. While this is always a theoretical risk, you have to believe that Pomerantz – even if his motives for writing this book were indeed about money – is simply too savvy to have needlessly handed Trump this kind of magic wand.
In contrast to the media and pundit realm, where virtually everything is going to be determined by some magic wand move by one side or the other, in reality magic wands do not exist. It’s why almost nothing in politics ever plays out in the manner that the media and pundit class predicts it will. It’s not that the media and pundit class is a bunch of oblivious idiots. It’s just that they know how good doomsday hype is for ratings. And so of course their response to the Pomerantz book is not to do their job of finding out why it’s being released right now, but instead to spin up some doomsday scenario in which the book causes Trump to magically go free.
Keep in mind that the mainstream media and pundit class spent awhile insisting that Donald Trump wasn’t even under criminal investigation. Then when it turned out he’d been under investigation for awhile, the media began insisting that none of those investigations would result in indictments. And now that it’s clear that Trump is going to be indicted in three different jurisdictions, the media is predictably spinning up narratives about why those indictments won’t result in convictions. But since they’ve been (willfully) wrong every step of the way so far, why believe them now?
Donald Trump is going to be criminally indicted on a smorgasbord of felony charges across three different jurisdictions. He’s going to be convicted at trial on most or all of them. He’s going to prison. This has been the obvious outcome all along. Everything else is just the media and pundit class trying to scare you into staying glued to your screens. The Pomerantz book isn’t going to cause Trump to magically go free. Things just aren’t that magically simplistic, anywhere outside of the political pundit bubble.
