While many of us awaited a potential indictment out of Washington, D.C. this week, Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg spent nearly 40 minutes on Tuesday being interviewed on New York’s public radio station. And at the very end, host Brian Lehrer could not resist inserting a question about Donald Trump, asking Bragg what will happen with the trial date for his criminal case against Trump “with the classified documents and now possibly January 6-related indictments coming.”
Bragg is somewhat notorious for not talking about his office’s Trump investigation. Even the press conference he held after charging Trump with falsifying business records in connection with the Stormy Daniels hush money settlement and related cover-up was itself somewhat out of character. Yet rather than batting away Lehrer’s question, Bragg made something of a public service announcement.
Specifically, while flagging the March 2024 trial date in his case, Bragg said “if and when” another indictment or indictments are issued, “we’ll see what happens to the schedule. We have a firm trial date …[but] in matters like this, you know, judges will … confer and take a very broad lens on justice.”
He then reminded Lehrer that the decisions are not ultimately his to make; after all, “judges set the trial schedule.” But that’s when Bragg suggested his office has some flexibility, explaining that even though he was first to charge the former president with a crime, he would “not sit on ceremony” about the timing or order of his criminal trials. Instead, he vowed to “take a broad look at what justice requires,” and if and when the various judges involved confer and determine that scheduling changes are necessary, he promised to follow their lead. It wasn’t exactly an offer to forfeit his first-in-line position. But if I were special counsel Jack Smith or Georgia’s Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, might I consider reaching out to Bragg over the next few weeks? You bet.
Lisa Rubin is an MS NOW legal correspondent and a former litigator. Previously, she was the off-air legal analyst for “The Rachel Maddow Show” and “Alex Wagner Tonight.”
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