What it really means that two Trump prosecutors have resigned from the Manhattan DA office
Two outside prosecutors who had been hired to work on the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal case against Donald Trump have resigned today, and the New York Times – which broke the story – is spinning it in almost apocalyptically negative fashion. This has, as always, brought out insistent cries that Trump will “get away with it all.” But once you dig into the story, you see that there’s actually no basis for coming anywhere near that conclusion. That said, the resignations remain mysterious in nature.
The doomsday hysteria surfacing in the wake of the NY Times article stems primarily from the sheer number of people who are coming away from the article with the impression that new Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg wants nothing to do with the case. But if you actually parse the article, you realize that’s not what it’s saying. In fact it’s not really saying anything.
Take, for instance, the article’s subheader, which claims that the new DA is “said to have expressed doubts about the case.” This is similar to the language coming from a subsequent Washington Post article today, which claims that Bragg is “less interested in the case than was his predecessor.” If this kind of phrasing sounds vague to you, it’s because it is. In general, the less your source has to offer to support his or her claims, the more passive and generic you have to be with your wording. This kind of wording is so passive and generic, it doesn’t pass the laugh test. “Said” to have expressed doubts? To whom? What doubts? “Less” interested? How much less interested? In what ways? Which specific charges is Bragg interested or not interested in running with? The source for these newspapers articles clearly does not possess this information, or they would have shared it. In other words, this “source” doesn’t know anything.
Moreover, much of the NY Times article in particular is based on filling in the missing pieces with scary innuendo. With a new DA taking office and inheriting a super high stakes criminal case already deep into the grand jury phase, would anyone be surprised that he would pause the proceedings until he could get his bearings on what he wanted to do with it? Further, the Times is out to lunch when it implies that the clock could run out on this grand jury and then Bragg would be facing long shot odds to be able to extend it. Back in the real world, extending the grand jury would be a formality.
Once you strip away all the nonsense, innuendo, doomsday clickbait, and fluff in these newspaper articles, the only story that remains is the fact that these two prosecutors resigned. It’s clear that neither of these newspapers, nor their sources, have any idea why the resignations happened. The two prosecutors who resigned clearly aren’t giving anything to the media. Instead the supposed details are from “sources” who are either just guessing or are outright making things up.
This is somewhat reminiscent of back when the Manhattan DA’s office was about to indict Allen Weisselberg and the Trump Organization, and Donald Trump’s lawyers managed to get Politico to run a false headline claiming that Trump himself was off the hook. The details of that article fell apart upon the slightest of scrutiny, because there was no story at all. Here there’s some story. These two prosecutors didn’t resign for no reason. But you almost have to wonder if these newspapers, in the absence of any sources who actually know anything, resorted to relying on Trump’s team as its supposed “source.”
In any case, the Manhattan DA’s office just released a statement confirming that the criminal investigation into Donald Trump is “ongoing.” So much for the notion that it’s over, and that Trump has gotten away with it all. It’s certainly not good news that these two prosecutors have resigned. But in order to spin their resignation into concluding that the Manhattan criminal case against Trump is dead, you’d need to have already baselessly decided a long time ago that Trump is going to somehow magically get away with it all no matter what – and today’s fairly absurd newspaper articles are aimed at racking up page views and ratings from the people who are locked into that particular confirmation bias.
If we had to speculate why these two prosecutors have resigned, based solely on logic and the limited details we do know, the most likely explanation would be that the District Attorney is looking at a set of criminal charges against Donald Trump that does not include these two prosecutors’ specialties – giving them no reason to stick around. If these two prosecutors thought the overall case against Trump were dead, and they were resigning in protest, they’d be saying so. People don’t resign in protest and then say nothing. So there’s clearly still a criminal case in place against Trump, as the DA just confirmed. It just may not be the case that these two prosecutors thought they were getting on board with. Beyond that, there’s very little we know tonight – except that the mainstream media is failing us by feeding us doomsday clickbait as usual, when in reality the story is likely to end up being far less controversial. Trump has been on a path to prison in New York all along, and there is nothing in today’s newspaper articles that should reasonably cause anyone to expect that to change.
