No, the Manhattan DA has not killed the criminal probe into Donald Trump
Given the concurrent timing, it seems fairly obvious that Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s decision to hold off indicting Trump at this time, is tied to the endgame we’re entering into in New York Attorney General Tish James’ Trump Organization probe.
Before getting into it, let’s be clear: Bragg can easily empanel a new grand jury at any time. Letting the current grand jury expire tells us nothing, except that he’s not moving forward with the indictment process now. In fact, Fulton County DA Fani Willis is about to empanel what will be at least the second grand jury she’s used in her Trump probe. Grand jurors are regular people with day jobs. You don’t just keep them empaneled indefinitely if you’re not moving forward with the grand jury process at the present time. You let them go and bring in a new one later.
With that out of the way, let’s get back to the New York situation. Tish James’ team told a judge this week that their civil probe is nearly complete. Trump, whether or not he cooperates, is the last witness before James announces her findings and punishments.
Depending on how long James decides to let Trump remain in contempt of court before just moving on without him, she could announce her findings at any time. She could probably do it tomorrow if she really wanted to. No, it’s not going to happen tomorrow. But it’s coming soon, and everyone involved knows it.
We do know that James will announce massive financial penalties against the Trump Org, start taking its assets, and possibly shut it down. What we don’t know is if she’ll also announce criminal indictments, or announce that her civil probe is now a criminal one. But Bragg surely knows what James is about to announce, because their offices have been partnered in investigating Trump’s finances.
It’s plausible that Bragg just didn’t want the risk of being the one to bring the indictments, and has decided to let James bring the criminal indictments at the state level instead. It’s also plausible that Bragg is waiting to bring indictments until after James drops the civil hammer, so he doesn’t have to go first.
But it would have been weird (and anticlimactic) if the local DA had criminally indicted Trump in, say, February, and then New York State hit Trump with financial penalties for those same crimes a few months later. Like, terrible optics level weird.
Bragg knows he could never get reelected as Manhattan DA, if Trump doesn’t get indicted during Bragg’s current term. Whatever you think of Bragg, he’s not an idiot. He understands how politics works, even if many of the people yelling doomsday things on Twitter have no idea how politics works.
So if Bragg isn’t indicting Trump now, it’s either because he’s going to indict Trump later, or because he expects that a bigger prosecutor will indict Trump and take the heat off him.
In spite of numerous false claims from Twitter pundits, Bragg never killed the Trump probe. He didn’t kill it and bring it back because of viral tweets about him. That never happened. Bragg has publicly made clear all along that the probe is ongoing and never stopped.
This brings us back to the question of why Bragg chased respected prosecutor Mark Pomerantz away. Was Bragg buying time because he didn’t want to be the one to indict Trump first? Did Bragg want credit for Pomerantz’s work? Did Bragg honestly think Pomerantz’s case was weak and needed to be built up more?
We may never learn those answers. But Bragg was certainly aware that if he was going to bring this kind of heat on himself by chasing away Pomerantz, he was going to have to follow it up later in a way that took all that heat off him. That’s just… kind of obvious.
Some folks on social media are still yelling that Bragg was “bribed!!!!” But that’s some kind of simplistic fantasyland where politicians are all idiots who are throwing away their careers in exchange for comparatively tiny bribes taken in plain sight in a way that will obviously get them caught. That’s not the real world.
Suffice it to say that corrupt politicians who take bribes tend to be good at it, and do it in a way that doesn’t put any heat or attention on them. If Bragg were on the take, he wouldn’t be doing it in this way, which has (for now) put all the heat and attention on him.
The logical conclusion is that Bragg is holding off because he either doesn’t want to make a move before James does, or because he’s handed the whole thing off to James. You don’t have to like how Bragg is handling this. I don’t. His handling of Pomerantz was clumsy at best. But we have to stop with the doomsday claims that the case has been dropped (untrue), or that the expiring grand jury means it’s all over (not how anything works).
