Former President Donald Trump on early Friday morning argued that filing charges against him could result in “potential death & destruction” as he railed against the possibility of an indictment by the Manhattan district attorney.
“What kind of person can charge another person, in this case a former President of the United States, who got more votes than any sitting President in history, and leading candidate (by far!) for the Republican Party nomination, with a Crime, when it is known by all that NO Crime has been committed, & also known that potential death & destruction in such a false charge could be catastrophic for our Country?” Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after 1 a.m. Friday.
“Why & who would do such a thing? Only a degenerate psychopath that truly hates the USA!” Trump wrote.
The post marked an escalation in Trump’s barrage of attacks against Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg as a grand jury is weighing whether to indict Trump over hush-money payments made to a porn star to keep quiet an alleged affair during the 2016 campaign.
It is also likely to further fuel concerns that Trump is stoking violence ahead of potential charges.
Trump’s rhetoric has alarmed some onlookers, who likened it to Trump’s calls for supporters to travel to Washington, D.C., ahead of Jan. 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol building to try and stop the certification of the 2020 election results.
Bragg has said in an internal memo to staff that he will not be intimidated by Trump’s rhetoric. In response to a letter from House Republicans for his testimony, Bragg argued the former president “created a false expectation that he would be arrested” with his Truth Social post last weekend.
Yesterday there were reports that Bragg had suddenly told the grand jury to stay home for the day. There was no clear explanation given but Fox News reported, based on anonymous sources, that there was “major dissension, inside Bragg’s office over the case. Specifically, one source claimed Bragg was having trouble convincing the grand jury to indict Trump.
The grand jury has been meeting on Mondays, Wednesday and Thursdays so I said yesterday that we’d know more when it became clear if the grand jury was meeting today or if that was scrapped as well. Today we have kind of a mixed result. The grand jury is meeting but not to hear about the Trump case.
It’s normal for grand juries to be working on more than one case at a time so it’s possible what they’re working on today has no connection to the Trump case.
Since the grand jury doesn’t meet on Fridays, the soonest we could see any movement on the Trump case is Monday. Will Bragg be ready to indict Trump by then or is this a delay really a sign he’s having problems?
Despite rumors of a potential imminent indictment, sources familiar told Fox News Digital that Trump has not been formally notified about whether Bragg actually plans to bring charges against him.
Sources told Fox News, though, that there remains a real chance that Bragg does not choose to indict the former president.
I have no inside information but my own feeling is that this has gone too far for Bragg to pull back now. He clearly wants to indict Trump which makes the delay this week surprising. So what’s going on here?
One possible explanation was sort of hinted at yesterday by Van Jones on CNN. Jones made the point that the New York case was pretty arguably not the strongest case against Trump and therefore, why not hold off a bit and let Georgia (which has a grand jury looking into Trump) go first. Here’s a bit of what Jones said.
What I’m saying is that this is going to be a tough decision, because unless the grand jury is just overwhelming, if there are any breaks or cracks in the grand jury, you add to that just a psychological reality that a lot of Democrats think, “Would you let Georgia go first. Could you get Trump in trouble for the coup? Do we have to start with porn star payoff?”…Nobody wants to be indicted. But I’m gonna tell you what, if you’re Donald Trump, the personal stuff, you’re correct, but would you rather be indicted about a porn star payout a long time ago, or for the insurrection, a coup, and trying to steal an election?Well, if you have Republicans watching and they think there is some sophisticated conspiracy by progressives to take over, you can relax now, because this is not well-coordinated. A well-coordinated progressive conspiracy would not start with the porn star, it would start with the coup. And so, I just think at the end of the day, he hasn’t made a decision yet, and we don’t know.
Van Jones has been irritating progressives by saying something like this all week.
The far left doesn’t like this but I wonder if this kind of talk is circulating behind the scenes among some on the left. And if so, is it possible that Bragg has been hearing something like this as well over the past few days. What’s your hurry, Alvin? Why not let Georgia go first? Wouldn’t it be better to start with the coup related indictment? Maybe that’s what the dissension in his office is about that Fox News has reported, i.e. not whether to indict Trump but when.
What I’m wondering aloud here is whether Bragg is even more of a political hack than we gave him credit for. Maybe he’s decided to try to coordinate his actions a little better with DAs in other states to make this as politically bad for Trump as it can be. There’s no legal reason to delay an indictment but as Van Jones suggests, politically it might help Democrats for Bragg to slow down. He doesn’t have to explain himself, he just needs to take a week off and give the grand jury in Georgia a little more time. Maybe that’s what we’re seeing happen this week.
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