Former President Donald Trump Wednesday claimed a Manhattan grand jury is resisting District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s push to charge him in the Stormy Daniels hush money case.
Without offering any evidence, Trump said he has “gained such respect for this grand jury” for supposedly pushing back on Bragg’s effort to win an indictment in the explosive case.
“The evidence is so overwhelmingly in my favor (that) the grand jury is saying, ‘Hold on, we are not a rubber stamp,” Trump wrote on his social media site. “We are not going to vote against the preponderance of the evidence.”
“There is no case here. Drop this sick witch hunt now!” he added.
Trump again lashed out at Bragg, calling the borough’s first Black district attorney “highly partisan and hateful.”
The former president appears to be trying to take advantage of a vacuum of information in the hush money case as the grand jury works in secret. The jury, sources told The News, will not be hearing the case for the rest of this week.
Trump used the same strategy of praising the grand jury in the Georgia election interference case after a judge last month unsealed a small portion of its report.
He was forced to reverse course days later and trashed the panel as an “illegal kangaroo court” after members of the grand jury broke their silence to suggest that their report actually does call for him and several allies to be charged in that case.
The Manhattan panel is not expected to take any action or hear any evidence in the Trump case until next week at the earliest, two weeks after Trump predicted he would be charged in the case.
But that doesn’t mean there is any snag in the case — as Trump says — and prosecutors are legally barred from commenting on his unfounded claims, legal experts say.
The last witness to appear before the panel was former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, who is a cooperating witness for the prosecution and admits to killing the porn star’s story about having sex with Trump.
Pecker may have rebutted testimony from Trump lawyer Robert Costello who says he trashed star prosecution witness Michael Cohen.
The grand jury works on several cases at once and may be asked at any time to vote on a indictment.
Bragg is reportedly mulling charging Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the hush money payments, which prosecutors say were designed to prevent voters from finding out about Daniels’ lurid claims in the days before the 2016 presidential election.
