Post from Truth Social

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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