Is the Georgia criminal case against Donald Trump really in trouble?
Today a new article from Business Insider claims that “trouble is brewing” for the Fulton County Georgia criminal probe into Donald Trump, as it’s supposedly been placed on the backburner due to the need to prosecute a spike in violent crimes instead. Naturally, this is causing the defeatists to declare that Trump is going to get away with it all and that all hope is lost. But there are a number of suspect things about the article in question.
For instance, the article claims that the prosecution of Trump has fallen behind due to a spike in violent crime in Atlanta. This 100% fits with the GOP narrative about big city crime somehow being up because of Biden. It’s too on the nose, right out of the gate.
Even if the Fulton County District Attorney did need to leak bad news about the case against Trump, she and her people would not have done it within the context of blaming it on violent crime. That’s pretty obvious. So who’s the actual “inside” source for this story? It’s surely not anyone involved with the DA’s decision making, or who’s particularly close to the matter.
Business Insider makes much of its content free, but this article – which happens to be precisely the kind of doomsday hysteria that sucks defeatists in – just happens to be behind a paywall. Business Insider knows this article is clickbait and has positioned it accordingly.
The Fulton County DA announced a couple months ago that she was already putting the Trump case in front of a grand jury. If that process went poorly, we’d be seeing leaks about how the case itself was faring poorly, not weird headlines about how the case is being delayed due to a bunch of murders.
Business Insider has a history of sometimes constructing dishonest articles by quoting random internet trolls but framing them as if they were experts on a subject, and such. Everything they publish has to be taken with a dump truck full of salt. In other words, when Business Insider says they have an expert or an inside source, you can’t assume that’s the case. Their source could be someone three steps removed from the story, who’s fed them a highly slanted version of what’s going on in order to further a personal agenda.
The real question is why someone felt compelled to leak this seemingly phony story at this particular time. The net result of this leak is that it makes Trump happy and that it pushes the GOP’s “crime in big cities” agenda, so maybe we should start there when trying to figure out who the source is.
You also have to wonder what, if anything, this is meant to counter. Does this mean that something is about to come out of Georgia, and the other side is trying to preemptively downplay it? We just saw Trump’s people play that same game earlier this summer, when on the eve of the initial New York criminal indictments, they fed Politico a phony story about how New York supposedly had no plans to ever indict Donald Trump.
This Business Insider article probably tells us nothing factual about the Georgia case against Trump, meaning we’re still in the dark about what’s really going on there. But then we usually are in the dark, during that stage after the grand jury for subpoenas is done, and before the grand jury for indictments is empaneled. As we just saw with the out-of-nowhere arrest of Tom Barrack, what’s happening in the media often tells us little or nothing about where any given criminal probe is headed.
One thing to watch for: now that this suspect story has been published, will the Fulton County DA counter it by leaking an accurate picture of the case? And if so, will it get one tenth as much media attention as the doomsday article about Trump getting away with it all?
