Playbook Deep Dive: What Trump’s indictment means

Well, I mean, in terms of the characters, yes, you’re right that this is all sort of a throwback to 2016-2018 period.

But, you know, one of the people who’s testified twice, I believe, in front of this grand jury and who is central to this whole episode and who I believe has never spoken publicly about it is David Pecker. And so if there’s any chance that he ends up testifying at a trial or ends up speaking about his side of the story, I would be very intrigued to hear that.

As you know, as someone who, you know, he was extremely close to Donald Trump and that’s how he got involved in this hush money payment to begin with. That’s someone I would really like to hear from at some point if there’s an opportunity to do that.

But in terms of the sort of the legal questions that are going to come up here, there’s quite a number. But I think the biggest one is, you know, I mentioned that the indictment is sealed. We don’t know what the counts are yet, but there’s a lot of questions about how the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, constructed these charges and whether they will survive in court, because if they are what we think they’re going to be, they’re a largely untested legal theory.

And Trump’s lawyers, of course, will try their hardest to fight them and given that they’re untested, there’s just a lot of questions about how they’ll survive. So that’s probably the biggest issue here. But then, of course, we will run into all sorts of questions about the sort of scheduling of legal proceedings and a potential trial for someone who is a presidential candidate. And that is likely to be very, very complicated. So.