Alvin Bragg just received full vindication from his Manhattan DA predecessor
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s thirty-four count criminal indictment of Donald Trump this week has the anti-Trump crowd cheering his name rather loudly these days. So it’s easy to forget that until about a month ago, most of the anti-Trump crowd had it out for Bragg so badly, they spent nearly a year spreading whacked out conspiracy theories on social media about how Bragg was supposedly being “bribed” or “blackmailed” by Trump.
Conspiracy theories are never anyone’s friend. They tend to be baseless, idiotic on their face, and easily disproven by known facts. For instance, when Bragg decided last year not to file charges against Trump at that time based on the case he’d inherited, Bragg emphatically (and repeatedly) stated that his Trump probe was ongoing. Even prosecutor Mark Pomerantz, who was very upset with Bragg for not filing charges at that time, never accused Bragg of having dropped the overall Trump probe.
Yet the mainstream media almost unanimously began falsely claiming that Bragg had dropped his Trump probe, because this kind of defeatist outrage was better for ratings than acknowledging that the probe was ongoing. And then the conspiracy theorists masquerading as Twitter political pundits decided to spin this false reporting about the case being “dropped” into this asinine narrative that Bragg was being “blackmailed.”
Because of this tidal wave of false information about Bragg, he was public enemy number one in anti-Trump circles for the better part of a year. That’s why it came as such a shock to everyone (outside of Palmer Report’s audience) when the news broke a couple months ago that Bragg had begun putting his Trump criminal case in front of a grand jury. This was always the likely, reasonable, expected outcome for anyone who was following the facts. But the media and pundit class had made it nearly impossible for anyone to follow the facts.
Alvin Bragg is of course receiving immediate vindication just by having indicted Donald Trump. But now the cavalry is arriving, so to speak. Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance appeared on the Jen Psaki show on Sunday and stated his view that at the time he left office, the Pomerantz case wasn’t yet complete. So of course Bragg didn’t file charges at that time. Even the DA who oversaw the construction of the Pomerantz case didn’t think it was a complete case that could have been filed at the time. Pomerantz clearly thought it was complete, but the architects of such things tend to always think their work is ready to go, and it takes a supervisor like a DA to scrutinize the case and figure out if it’s truly ready to go.
One might ask why Vance didn’t speak up sooner, back when Pomerantz was bashing Bragg for having refused to file charges at that time. Perhaps Vance didn’t think it was his place. Not that it would have mattered at the time anyway. The (entire) media was so intent on spinning the situation into a “Trump is off the hook” narrative, it was already lying about what Bragg and Pomerantz were both saying. If Vance had said anything at the time, the media would likely have just lied about what he was saying as well.
In any case, the vindication of Alvin Bragg just keeps on going. There’s an important lesson in here that should’t get lost. The public should not have allowed itself to be goaded by the media’s false narratives about Bragg, or the internet’s defeatist conspiracy theories about Bragg, into believing that Bragg was some kind of corrupt coward who had decided to let Trump off the hook for underhanded reasons. All of that Bragg-bashing was based entirely on claims that were false and ridiculous. All it accomplished was to weaken Bragg’s overall reputation and standing ahead of Trump’s inevitable indictment – which is the last thing the anti-Trump crowd should have been doing. Let’s not allow the media and pundit class to goad audiences into making this kind of mistake the next time we’re in a similar situation.
