Joining me now, Adam Klasfeld, fellow at Just Security.
He was in the New York courtroom all week.
Adam, great great to see you.
Thanks for being here. Since you've been inside the courtroom,
what's your sense of how the case is going?
The case got started off with the bang with the
testimony of David Pecker,
because David Pecker really gave the case a wide angle
lens.
We've been hearing about the hush money scheme.
We've been hearing about Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels.
But with David Pecker's testimony,
what we got was a wide angle lens of the
spectrum of ways that Donald Trump and the National
Enquirer's corporate parent had joined forces in.
David Pecker's words should be the eyes and ears of
the campaign to send stories puffing up Donald Trump to
supermarket checkout stands across America,
to attack Donald Trump's rivals and to find out if
there were,
in Pecker's words, women selling stories and then silencing those
women.
And so it takes the case from the
keyhole view of yes or falsified records.
The prosecutors argue
that were correlated with the stormy Daniel payments to a
larger spectrum of what they describe as a corruption of
the 2016 presidential election.
So, so Adam, here's how Trump describes,
describes the trial. Listen,
so rig trial, terrible, but we're doing very well in
this rig trial.
Everybody knows that the case is over.
You heard what was said and the case should be
over.
Adam, who exactly has said the case should be over?
Well, there hasn't been any
legal scholar that has been
really saying it quite the way Trump has right there,
These press conferences, they happen every morning.
And there is a very marked difference between
Trump's demeanor outside the court in clippings like the ones
you just showed and the what you see in the
courtroom.
There have been reports of course of Trump nodding off.
There have been reports of course.
And I saw at one moment,
we're now on to the third witness after the second
witness,
Rona Grass, when her testimony had finished,
he sort of lunch out of his chair to shake
her hand,
which of course, you are not supposed to do as
a criminal defendant.
And if you look very closely at the transcript,
it says at that moment the audience couldn't hear it,
but the court reporter did.
Are you OK? And so there's a kind of impression
that there may be something,
an impression that he's trying to put forward to the
jury as the witnesses end their testimony.
So then, Adam, how is the jury responding to Trump's
antics inside,
inside the courtroom and the witnesses so far?
Well, Jonathan, they're all business.
And I'll give you an example.
The jurors, when they file into court every morning,
they are passing Trump by a couple of feet away.
It's not very large of a courtroom,
especially in the well, and their eyes are for the
most part fix right forward.
And we've seen this throughout the trial.
There was a moment where the judge had asked them
if they had writing materials and
the folks who no one did and asked if they
wanted it,
their hands all shot up and they've been taking notes.
They're very intently scrutinizing the evidence on both sides.
They're listening to cross examination,
they're listening to direct examination and they're they're jotting down
notes.
They want to remember things when we get to deliberations.
So they are. They're treating it with the professionalism you
would expect of a trial of this magnitude.
One more question for you.
For you, Adam. One of my guests yesterday,
Renato Mariotti. Mariotti Mariotti said he believes Judge Mishan is
using the threat of a gag order ruling to force
Trump's lawyers to rein him in.
What do you think?
I think that's very sharp analysis.
And one of the things that I always mention is
that
Trump has already faced consequences even before any ruling has
taken place because
we did not we, the public and
Trump's legal team did not find out who the first
witness was until the day before trial.
And that's because the judge made very clear that he
believed in the
DA's office believed that he couldn't be trusted with the
names because he goes and attacks witnesses
in the prosecutors claims on social media.
So there was that fear,
and that fear has been addressed
by by the judge taking that sanction.