The apparent grand jury delays in Manhattan have prompted speculation about what’s happening with the Donald Trump hush money probe. It’s fair to wonder, but the bottom line is that we just don’t know at this point, given the secrecy surrounding grand jury proceedings.
But that hasn’t stopped Trump, the potential subject of an indictment by that grand jury, from launching claims about the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office that don’t appear to be backed by evidence. On Thursday, he claimed — again, without evidence — that there’s “total disarray” and “tremendous dissension and chaos” at DA Alvin Bragg’s office, which could bring the first charges against a former U.S. president:
Total disarray in the Manhattan D.A.’s Office. Tremendous dissension and chaos because they have NO CASE, and many of the honest people in the Office know it, and want to do the right thing. They think back to the Late, Great, Bob Morgenthau, the best ever, and know what he would have done. JUSTICE FOR ALL!
As I’ve noted, the reasons for the grand jury’s reportedly not meeting to consider the hush money case on Wednesday or Thursday could be entirely mundane. We might later learn that there’s something deeper to the story, but there isn’t public evidence of that currently. Certainly, a couple of days off in a monthslong grand jury presentation isn’t proof that the DA’s office has “NO CASE,” much less “chaos.”
And the former president’s praise of Bob Morgenthau is interesting. Morgenthau was the legendary Manhattan DA who served for decades before Cyrus Vance, Bragg’s predecessor. Earlier this week, the author of a Morgenthau biography wrote in The New York Times that he had asked the longtime DA, shortly before his 2019 death, what his greatest fear was. Morgenthau, the biographer wrote, “did not hesitate to answer: ‘Trump.’”
Jordan Rubin is the Deadline: Legal Blog writer. He was a prosecutor for the New York County District Attorney’s Office in Manhattan and is the author of “Bizarro," a book about the secret war on synthetic drugs. Before he joined MS NOW, he was a legal reporter for Bloomberg Law.
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