Alvin Bragg and the Manhattan grand jury have pushed back to Monday. What’s going on, and is it related to the DOJ’s Trump case?
So the Manhattan grand jury didn’t sit for the Donald Trump case today, after it was reported yesterday that it would. Major news outlets are reporting that the case won’t resume until Monday. What’s going on? There’s no way to know for sure, but there are a few plausible explanations, and some of them are interesting.
I said yesterday that Alvin Bragg would have to delay things again for me to believe that he could be waiting for the DOJ to go first – and now he has. At this rate Bragg isn’t indicting until at least after the DOJ has Trump’s attorney testify. This may or may not be coincidence, but it’s reached a point where it can’t just be ignored.
The DOJ may have informed Bragg that it’s indicting Trump next week. It may have asked him to hold off, or he may have just taken a hint. I don’t see Bragg waiting just for Corcoran to testify; he’d only be waiting due to an actual Trump indictment, right?
We have no idea what Jack Smith’s indictment timeline is. He could wait for all charges against Trump to be ready (1/6 etc) before bringing any of them. Or he could be planning to indict Trump on obstruction the minute Corcoran testifies, and bring superseding charges later.
This comes down to why Uthe .S. Court of Appeals is treating Corcoran’s testimony as the most urgent thing ever. Is this about getting an immediate indictment against Trump, or just about immediately getting urgent national security info out of Corcoran so they can use it to hunt down a certain classified document?
There is also the very real possibility that whatever the DOJ has going on, it has nothing to do with the Manhattan delays. There could be a few explanations for this.
Bragg was reportedly planning to put one or two witnesses in front of the grand jury today. One existing witness and one new unnamed person. I said yesterday that I didn’t know whether I believed this reporting, because it seemed to originate from Trump’s guy Costello. Sure enough, that reporting was wrong in the sense that no one testified today.
But if two more people are testifying, and they weren’t both going to be able to finish today, perhaps that was the impetus for delay. Or maybe one of them became unavailable today (illness etc). It’s also possible that Bragg is holding off because he reportedly has evidence that can get Trump attorney Joe Tacopina kicked off the case, and he’s following through on that before bringing the indictment.
It’s also possible that the testimony given by Trump’s pal Costello was full of so much crap, it’s taking them this long to parse it all and pick it apart. It’s a golden opportunity to take this stuff off the table now, and not at trial. But it’s still a bunch of muck.
There are also more boring explanations. The Manhattan grand jury supposedly met today, just not to hear the Trump case. Maybe Bragg was looking to have that jury today, but he couldn’t wrest it away from some other case. Could be that simple.
Remember, this is real life not the movies. When we’re ranking possibilities from most likely to least likely, we have to do it based on their actual likelihood. We can’t just assign their likelihood based on how intriguing or boring they are.
But there’s still no indication whatsoever that the Manhattan DA isn’t going to indict Donald Trump. In fact, after a few social media posts yesterday based in the delusional hope that the DA might decide not to indict him, Trump is now back to whining about how he expects to be indicted. If even Trump doesn’t think he’s magically getting away with it all, that tells you something.
