9 posts from Sunday, April 21, 2024

I thought I'd hit the streets this week and ask people what the heck is going on with Donald Trump and this new gag order? What's going on with this Trump gag order? They're not letting him speak. I think it's ridiculous that they put a gag order on him in an election year when he's trying to do a campaign and they're going to hinder him from running as a candidate. So I don't agree with that in any which way. I think it's totally wrong what they're doing. It's unconstitutional. They're using the judicial system against a former president, which has never happened in American history. I think it's illegal. He has a constitutional right to speak his mind and it shouldn't be done. For being used against President Trump like this, it's a banana republic, that's all. The gag order is definitely a, you know, just an attack on Trump and to stop him from winning this race. He's the best candidate there is. They've been after Trump for the longest time. The gag order is just to try to quiet him down and shut him up. He's coming up with the big numbers, so they need to shut him down and that's the way the judges are doing it, with the gag order. And we as the people have to stand up and say enough is enough. I mean, how many times can they try to gag one man? And if you look back over the last eight years, it's no wonder they want to give him a gag order because everything he says winds up being true.

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Joining me now with an inside look at this historic moment and this historic case as it gets started is former Trump attorney and former prosecutor Jim Trustee. Jim, great to see you. You too, Brian. All right, Jim. Preview the opening statements for me. First off, before we actually do, let me ask you this. The speed in which this jury's been sat and selected, alternatives and alternates included, does it bother you if you're working for Trump? Yeah, look, I mean, the big danger in this case with a venue like New York, Manhattan particularly, is you're going to get a bunch of sleepers. You're going to get people that want to be on this jury. They're going to say the right thing to make sure they don't get immediately eliminated from the jury pool, but they're actually very biased. And so time is your helper. You want time to investigate these people, figure out do they have some social media moments that show their true colors, have time questioning them and then really doing the comparative exercise of which ones can we live with on the jury, which ones can we not. Picking a jury in four days is a pretty quick pace for that much of a high profile case. That would give me some concern. They don't know enough about all the jurors that are going to be in the box. It sounds strange to say, but we still don't know exactly what they're charging him with. What are they actually saying that Trump did that warrants a criminal trial? Yeah, that's a great question because there is a lot of opaqueness to this charging document. The indictment is 34 counts of fraudulent book entries, but it is a bare bones indictment. It does not lay out the government's case in any detail. If you go back to the beginning, what Alvin Bragg did is he issued what he called a statement of facts at the time of his big press conference, which was not anything to do with the grand jury. So it was actually a pretty unethical moment where a prosecutor decided he was just going to enable himself to talk about the facts of the case. But what they're trying to do is take misdemeanor book entries and turn them into felonies by saying President Trump had a specific intent to defraud the voting public by entering in legal services instead of spelling out that it was legal services associated with the Non-Disclosure Act. Pretty much historically unique and something you'll never see again, I'm sure. I hope not. Opening statements. What's the opening statement if you're the prosecution? What should be included? Well a couple things. I mean, number one, you know, in high profile cases, prosecutors tend to overplay their opening statement, commit to too much detail, too long an opening statement for the attention spans of the jurors. So I think the smart thing to do, and I don't know if they'll do it, would be to be kind of punchy to tell the story and get in and get out. And what's interesting is, you know, Michael Cohen is looming in the background for both sides an opening statement. If you're a prosecutor, you do not want to attribute too much of this case to Michael Cohen. You know the defense is going to tee off about Cohen. So I think the prosecution basically tells the story, either downplaying Cohen and saying he's not that important, or kind of a more subtle way to not attribute every piece of evidence to say the evidence will show that President Trump was doing X, Y, and Z, and not saying Michael Cohen will testify alone to those facts. So I think you obscure Cohen's role. Gotcha. Now the opening statements show if his defense team is up for this challenge. What should be in it? Well, they need to make it all about Cohen. You know, there's a lot that's wrong with this prosecution in terms of it being creative, about avoiding statute of limitations, about political bias and intrigue. But at the end of the day, now you're on the merits, now you're at trial. You need to make it about Cohen, and you hope that at least one or two jurors, if not more, say I would never buy a used car from Michael Cohen, say, how can I base my verdict on this guy's credibility? Make it all about him from A to Z. Don't spend any time at all about non-disclosure agreements other than saying they're legal. If they were illegal, Congress would be in prison. They have a whole fund set up for NDAs, for non-disclosure agreements. So again, walk past the women involved in this without doing any sort of attacks. Get right to Cohen, make it all about him. And don't put Trump on the stand, correct? It's not worth it? Yeah, I mean, I think it's a very difficult thing. You know, he's been a public figure for so many years. He's had so many questions and comments that have been put to him or put through him over the years that there's a lot of room to explore beyond this case to attack him. And I don't think you want to put him in the credibility battle with Cohen. It's not that he's not more credible, it's just why distract from Cohen? No cameras on the inside, a lot of sketching on the inside, and we'll get to see some of the photos and get the firsthand accounts. Jim Trusty, I look forward to talking to you along the way. We've got about five or six weeks of you taking my calls, so I hope you don't get sick of me or change your number. Thanks, Jim.

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There he is. Even at the defense table, he looks like a winner. He really does. There aren't enough people out there defending him, calling out this trial for the total farce that it is. Handful of folks in conservative media, but not as much as it should be. It should be widespread everywhere. This should not be happening. As usual, he's his own best advocate. Take a look. - The whole world is watching this hoax. You got a DA that's out of control. You have a judge that's highly conflicted. The whole thing is a mess, and you have the leading candidate and leading crooked Joe Biden by the line. He's the one that should be in trial. He's a crook. You got a crooked president. He should be in trial with all the stuff he's done in his family. He should be in trial, but he's the one in charge. - It's so true. Anyway, they say, "Oh, that's not true." And they try to fact check him all afternoon long. It's not. He's holding some papers, yeah, from some of the legal heavyweights out there. There should be more. And they kind of tiptoe around the issue, but good for him for finding support where we can. - I'm supposed to be in New Hampshire. I'm supposed to be in Georgia. I'm supposed to be in North Carolina, South Carolina. I'm supposed to be in a lot of different places campaigning, but I've been here all day on a trial that really is a very unfair trial. These are all stories. This is over the last few days from legal experts. This is "Wall Street Journal" editorial. But all of these are stories from legal experts saying how this is not a case. The case is ridiculous. This is another one of the cases. A ridiculous Trump indictment. It's missing fraud, there is no fraud. All of these stories are stories of how, and these are done by the experts, and editorials. Greg falsified business record and he falsifies them. He's the one. He's the fraud. But take a look at all of these, our stories. You see them here. Greg's indictment even falls as an indictment. All of them. Greg crosses the Rubicon indicting Trump, on nonsense. On nonsense. Yeah, I know some people like, why would he do that holding those papers there? Why not? How would you act if you were wrongly accused and pulled off your job and you got to sit in that courtroom all day long, but it's not getting them down? I haven't seen this before in court. You see that, that hand pump? I love it. And you know what? Look, in America, I don't have a problem with some of the people who showed up for jury duty. I don't. The ones who are honest, the ones who said that they were biased, and yeah, that's kind of to be commended. There are people out there, unlike the judge, who know that they're not impartial. Take a look. - Personally, I do not like him at all. I don't approve of a lot of what he has done as president, but I think that the right to a fair trial in this country is incredibly important. - If there's a reason that you don't think you could be impartial or that you could be perceived as biased, that you should raise your hand. So I raised my hand. - What happened? Why were you dismissed? - Because I couldn't be impartial. - You couldn't be impartial. When the judge asked that hand, can you be impartial? You raised your hand and you said you cannot. - Exactly. - And good for her. Good for all of them. The judge, as he's asking these questions, he's the one. It should have dawned on him. What am I doing? I'm a complete hypocrite. I am totally and completely conflicted. I can't do this. You know, if the judge came in as a juror and he said, hey, you know, my daughter works in politics and I gave money to Joe Biden, it's by a matter of logic, he can't be a juror. Therefore, he can't be a judge. But he is. And he drew up this rigged questionnaire. You heard about the questionnaire? Totally skewed, totally strange. Now, one thing Newsmax has mentioned, I love it. They wanna know if anybody gets their news from a bunch of different sources, including Newsmax. All right, what else is in there? Oh, a list. Do you currently follow any anti-Trump or organization on any social media site? Or have you done so in the past? And then they list a bunch of, well, I mean, let's face it, pretty hardcore groups out there. But they don't mention anything about Joe Biden. They don't mention anything about Black Lives Matter. You know, if you are for Biden, you're kind of automatically against Trump. Anyway, I talked to some legal experts. This thing is skewed and designed to find a biased jury, as if we didn't have enough problems. Anyway, they'll get through it, but we've got to help in any way we can. And I don't know, maybe it's writing a check. Maybe it's, think about it. All right, next. - Donald Trump is no stranger to violating norms. - Trump is violating norms. - He violates political norms. When he violates constitutional norms, Trump has violated norms. - Oh yeah, the norms. And this is totally normal. Having a former president in court for this nonsense, and it is nonsense, and we have to recognize a guy named Mike Pomerance. He is a really bad guy. An evil doer, I think, in this whole scheme. He is a former prosecutor who volunteered to basically do legal work for the district attorney, for Alvin Bragg. You can't do this stuff for free. Donald Trump is fully aware of this dude. - You have Pomerance, Mark Pomerance. - He was Hillary Clinton's lawyer, Democrat National Committee's lawyer. He worked in Paul Weiss, he walked in, and he took over the district attorney's office, nobody's ever seen anything like that, to prosecute Trump. And then they wouldn't do what he wanted to do, and he goes out and he writes a book long before any decisions were made. He writes a book about it. And the book gets published, and everybody's reading his book. And the judge said there's nothing wrong with that. It is so incredibly unethical. And the book, though, yeah, he incriminates himself big time. I read the book. Not as many people read the book as you might think. When I joined the Trump investigation, I got countless emails and telephone calls from friends and colleagues urging me to go get 'em! And wishing me luck. How about that, huh? That, he put it in a book. It's one thing to have friends who hate Trump, but see how arrogant they are. Listen to this. I was enthusiastic about working on the case, and happy to work without pay. You see, when you're a lawyer, you're professional, professional cannons and all that stuff, it doesn't work if you don't get money. This is not pro bono. This is not a pro bono situation. This, I think you get disbarred for this, or maybe it will lend itself to a mistrial. Something else, this guy is, he goes right for the juicy stuff. I dug into the payment of hush money to Stephanie Clifford. I started there because it was interesting and easy to understand. You see, you think these guys care about the law? No, it was interesting to him. Let's see. I had followed the whole story from the sidelines, and it involved allegations of sexual infidelity. Is that why you liked it so much, pal? As compared to delving into the valuation of various real estate holdings, he wanted to talk about this. He comes up with this crazy plan that they're actually pursuing right now, and in the book he says it's undoable. To charge Trump with something other than a misdemeanor, the District Attorney of New York, D-A-N-Y, would have to argue that the intent to commit or conceal a federal crime had converted the falsification of the records into a felony. Nobody understands that. No appellate court, you see, in New York had ever upheld or rejected this interpretation of the law. It seemed we could not thread the needle of New York's antiquated penal law to find an appropriate felony charge that was immune from legal challenge, but they're doing it anyway. They're doing it anyway. Who's gonna stop 'em? Right? The people? (laughs) They laugh at us. I think we're gonna get the laugh. Laugh.

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