The thing everyone is missing about the Manhattan DA criminal case against Donald Trump

Yesterday two prosecutors resigned from the Manhattan District Attorney’s criminal case against Donald Trump. I’ve already spelled out in detail how the two major newspapers that broke the story clearly had no legitimate information on why they resigned, and had instead decided to merely turn their articles into innuendo-laden doomsday clickbait. Upon further reflection I think there’s a crucial piece to the story whose importance even I didn’t fully pick up on while trying to distill what’s really going on.

The way the story has been presented by most pundits, and interpreted by most observers, is that two career Manhattan DA’s office prosecutors resigned and gave up their careers because they were so opposed to how the new DA is handling the Trump is case. But that’s not actually what happened – at all. Former Manhattan DA Cy Vance hired these two outside prosecutors to come in and work on the Trump criminal case, as hired guns. Once the Trump case was over, they were always going to go right back out the door. They appear to have an issue with the direction the new DA has decided to take the case in, so they’re walking. But they’re not walking away from their careers. They’re just bailing on one very specific case they were hired to work on, after the nature of that case changed.

So this represents yet another way in which the media’s framing of these resignations is hyperbolic and overblown. As I said yesterday, no one in the media knows specifically why these two prosecutors resigned. But the media sure is going out of its way to baselessly frame this as a doomsday scenario where the new Manhattan DA is such a disaster, people in his office are throwing away their careers in protest. That’s simply not what happened here. No careers were sacrificed. Nothing nearly that dramatic happened.

When you pair this with the mainstream media’s decision to (mostly) ignore the Manhattan DA’s statement last night that the case against Trump is ongoing, it becomes all the more clear that the media is feeding us a made-up hyperbolic doomsday narrative about the Trump case when the media in fact has no idea what the real narrative is.

Again, the real upshot here is that the two newspapers who broke this story are framing their claims about the Manhattan DA in such passive generic weasel words, it’s clear that their “sources” aren’t anywhere near the real action and are either guessing because they want to feel important, or strategically making it up to fit an agenda. Claims that the DA is “said to have expressed doubts about the case” and is “less interested in the case than was his predecessor” are constructed in laughably weak fashion. And if you look carefully at the NY Times suggestion that the case against Trump could “peter out,” the wording gives away that it’s pure empty speculation on the part of the article author with nothing to support it.

We’ve seen this kind of doomsday hysteria from the media before. How many times have they claimed that the Manhattan criminal case against Trump is dead, doomed, dormant, in peril, or over with? Each time, audiences fall for it. And then each time, days or weeks later, reports surface that the DA’s office is indeed putting new evidence and testimony in front of the grand jury. Is this merely yet another instance of the media presenting things in misleadingly doomsday fashion? Probably. We’ll find out soon enough. In the meantime, let’s resist the urge to preemptively turn against the Manhattan DA. As of now there’s no basis for doing so. He’s only been on the job for several weeks, and he’s just been blindsided by faultily sourced, gossip rag level “reporting” from two major newspapers. Let’s give him a minute to figure out how to properly respond to this. And yes, there’s still every reason to expect that Trump is on a path to prison. Nothing has changed on that front, beyond the way the major newspapers are slanting their headlines.