Sen. Susan Collins released a statement yesterday denouncing the Manhattan trial verdict and in the course of that claiming that District Attorney Alvin Bragg “campaigned on a promise to prosecute Donald Trump.” I and others have looked in vain for any evidence of this. My assumption going in was that this was false and all research supports that contention.
It is always hard to prove a negative. But there’s some paradoxical assist in this from a year old article by Byron York in which York tries to sustain this claim by noting what other candidates said and trying to stitch together disparate statements from Bragg that he says amounts to a pledge or even claiming that Bragg had resorted to a progressive code to make such a pledge without using any of the normal English words. According to York, when Bragg said “people in power” he meant Trump and when he said he would hold people “accountable” that was code for prosecuting Trump. (I’m not making this up or exeggerating. He says all of this.) In other words, York labored to susain this claim by every strategy other than providing any evidence for the claim.
Clearly York was extremely focused on proving the Bragg had made such a campaign promise. The fact that York, an able researcher and reporter, wasn’t able to come up with any evidence of that at all and had to rely on these arguments about secret progressive codes and stitching together disparate lines of text like he was assembling a kidnap ransom letter gets us about as close to proving the negative as is humanly possible. In that sense this was true service journalism, albeit somewhat unintentional, on Byron’s part.
What Collins stated unambiguously and declaratively was clearly false. Whether she was just going on false GOP claims or confused Alvin Bragg with Tish James I do not know. But she really needs to retract this false claim and apologize to Bragg. As far as I know, no reporter has yet pressed her on this false claim.
