No Return Date

A few weeks ago, I told you about a chief justice who vanished into medical leave without explanation, two days after formal misconduct charges landed against a colleague he was a key witness against. I told you about two sworn statements — months apart — that cannot both be true.This week, New Hampshire’s judiciary said something out loud it hadn’t said before: there’s no forecasted return date for Chief Justice Gordon MacDonald. Not “soon.” Not “under review.” Nothing. And in the same statement, the court admitted something I did not expect — even his fellow justices say they haven’t been told what’s actually wrong.To be clear, and I mean this: he owes no one a diagnosis. That’s his right, full stop. But a right and its optics are different animals, and the optics here are getting harder to explain with a two-paragraph press release.So this is a shorter one. A follow-up. Because the story didn’t end — it just went quiet, and quiet is sometimes the loudest thing in the room.In this episode:— What the court actually said this week, word for word, and what it didn’t say— The wild bit of irony buried in New Hampshire history: MacDonald himself spent eighteen months on the outside of an empty chief justice seat before he ever sat in it— A hard look at whether December’s hearing on Justice Hantz Marconi can mean anything at all when its most consequential witness — Gordon MacDonald — appears once, in one sentence, and is currently unreachable— Real precedent for why a retired judge can still face real discipline— The Dianne Martin question I still can’t let go of: how does an outgoing director get to negotiate the terms of her own exit and her own rehire?I don’t have all the answers here, and I’m not going to pretend I do. What I have is a hearing date, a growing list of unanswered questions, and a habit of writing both down where you can see them.December 7th through 9th, One Granite Place, Concord. Still on the calendar. I’ll be there.Whether Gordon MacDonald will be — that’s the question the whole state should be asking.Receipts over vibes. Always. Get full access to The Gracie Gato Podcast at gracieformermrsgato.substack.com/subscribe