At one point, in response to
Todd Lance just generally saying that his client was,
you know, doing his best to follow
the terms of the gag order,
the judge Marshawn turned to him and said you are
losing all credibility.
So first thing on Monday the judge told us,
gave us his verdict in what's known as a sand
of all hearing,
which happened last Friday. So essentially the judge decided that
if Trump testifies,
the prosecution is allowed to bring up just sort of
the basic facts of four of Trump's past legal entanglements
that did not go well for him.
And if Trump justifies, they can bring out the 2
E Jean Carroll defamation suits
involving her sexual law claim.
They can bring up the
Attorney General Letitia James's civil fraud trial and the verdict
that came out of that.
And they can bring up a case from a few
years back where
Trump's charitable organization was accused of fraud and ultimately solved
after that,
we finally got into opening statements which gave us a
look at
what story each side is ultimately going to shape up
for the jury prosecution story.
It was that Donald Trump committed a smaller crime,
falsification of business records in service of a much bigger
crime,
which was improperly influencing the outcome of the 2016 presidential
election.
The defense had a slightly different job to do because
the burden of proof obviously rests with prosecution.
What we saw was Trump's attorney Todd Blanche trying to
make a few different points,
which is first, first and foremost that Donald Trump is
innocent.
And next he tried to
playoff what happened to with the checks to Stormy Daniels.
That is the basis of the 34 counts of falseifying
business records as no big deal.
He called them just 30-4 pieces of paper.
And then he suggested that you can't really trust anyone
who's going to be giving witness testimony in this case,
namely Michael Cohen. David Becker was our first witness.
So at at the time,
he was running the national choir and the company that
publishes it,
American Media Inc And So what happened?
What he testified to was this
sort of now infamous meeting at Trump Tower in August
2015.
So it was a couple months after Trump announced he
was going to run for president.
He called in David Pecker,
Michael Cohen and Hope Hicks,
who is the spokesperson at the time.
And they all had a conversation about how David Pecker
and his magazines could help the Trump campaign.
Pecker agreed to was to publish positive stories about Trump,
to publish negative stories about Trump's political enemies.
There was a hearing about Trump's gag order
and the prosecutors brought up ten instances where they say
Trump violated the gag order.
And one of those that I spent a little bit
of time on in the hearing
was actually a repost.
Trump re shared something that had come from Fox News
host Jesse Watters where he said,
you know, they're trying to get liberal activists on the
Trump jury,
which is obviously not true.
Trump's team tried to argue that,
you know, the repost shouldn't even count because he wasn't,
you know, like coming up with that content.
He was just re sharing it and the judge was
absolutely did not seem to be buying that.
We've seen Trump continue to attack the court,
the judge, the prosecutors, the
witnesses, the prosecution has said that they will basically take
into account like the most recent,
the stuff that we've seen this week
that are probable gag order violations.
The judge has yet to
rule on whether or not Trump violated his gag order.
It seems likely that Trump may face a fine.
The prosecutors are asking for a fine of
$1000 for each alleged violations or 10 violations of
$10,000. But if this keeps going,
I mean the the judge has the power to jail
Trump,
which would be pretty extreme given who he is.
But if he, you know,
doesn't show any willingness to him in his commentary,
there are other roads
that the judge could take in that matter.