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May 30, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
49:22
Trump Found Guilty: Ben Shapiro Breaks Down the Verdict
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Late on Thursday afternoon, American democracy came under extraordinary threat when a New York jury, 12 New Yorkers, decided to convict Donald Trump.
He's been found guilty by the jury on 34 separate felony counts.
If he is sentenced to jail time, that jail time could be up to four years of all the sentences run concurrently.
It's a travesty of justice.
This case was a joke from the very beginning.
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who set this entire thing up to become more famous and more powerful.
Judge Juan Merchant.
who basically gave every benefit to the prosecution, whose jury instructions were unprecedented
in their willingness to flout the law.
This was all set up to convict Donald Trump simply so that Democrats could either jail Donald Trump
or spend the next few months declaring Donald Trump a convicted felon for purposes of the election.
The actual methodology by which he was found guilty is utterly uncertain.
As we discussed a little bit earlier today, the reality is that there were two crimes alleged,
a misdemeanor falsification of business records, which would not have resulted in any possible jail time.
But that was reliant to become a felony on other, on other crimes, unspecified crimes.
And those crimes could have been a violation of federal finance law,
except that Donald Trump clearly did not violate federal finance law.
Not only that, the federal government never even bothered to charge him
with violating federal finance law, federal election law in 2016.
Check your calendar.
It is currently 2024, and the case that New York just made is effectively that Donald Trump violated election law in 2016, falsified business records in 2017, and somehow, despite the fact that the statute of limitations has run already, this is now a Class E felony in the state of New York, lengthening the statute of limitations.
The number of hoops they had to jump through in order to manufacture this case is extraordinary.
The number of pretzel-like contortions the prosecution had to drag the jury through was extraordinary.
But in the end, did any of that matter?
In the end, was this ever about the legality of the case or the evidence presented by a porn star, Stormy Daniels, or a convicted perjurer, Michael Cohen?
Was it ever about any of that?
Or was it simply this?
If you get Donald Trump in front of a jury of his supposed peers in New York City, one of the bluest places in America, and you charge him with anything, if you charge him with jaywalking, they will convict him.
We all know the answer to this.
This was, in fact, jury nullification, but it was also prosecutorial nullification and judicial nullification of the law.
The law has nothing to do with this verdict whatsoever.
This particular trial was certainly about getting Donald Trump.
So, did they get Donald Trump?
We have yet to find out.
I think the backlash on this is going to be extraordinary because this is so obviously a manufactured case.
It's so obviously a stupid case that has nothing to do with Donald Trump's supposed violations of law.
I don't think the American people are going to stand for this.
I think that if Joe Biden believes this is going to somehow redound to his benefit rather than appearing as a politically motivated hit job on his political opponent in an unprecedented prosecution of the man most likely to take him out of office in November, I think he's got another thing coming.
I think this makes Joe Biden a hero in his own mind.
I don't think the American people are going to react quite that way.
Now, as to what happens next, as to what happens next, there is a procedure and there is a process as to what happens next.
But it is quite possible that Donald Trump could end up in jail because Judge Merchen has been out to get Trump this entire time.
From the gag order to the allowance of evidence, Judge Merchen has made clear he wants Donald Trump convicted.
I think he's going to make clear he wants him behind bars.
So, what exactly happens next?
Well, there's now a sentencing hearing.
That sentencing hearing will be within two or three months of the verdict.
So we're going to get weeks and weeks of speculation about whether Donald Trump is going to go to jail.
Trump's attorneys presumably will attempt to appeal to the judge and hope to postpone the sentencing beyond the election.
Merchant is almost certainly not going to go along with that because obviously the reason that he has structured this trial in this way is to convict Donald Trump and put him behind bars or at least sentence him prior to the election.
Now Trump is going to be dragged to jail today.
That's not the way this works because it's a non-violent felony.
He will not be detained pre-sentencing or forced to post bail in all likelihood.
Instead, in the next few weeks, he'll be dragged over to the dingy probation office at the New York City courthouse.
According to the Washington Post, the probation office would put together a pre-sentencing report for Judge Murchin.
As part of that process, Trump would be required to participate in an interview with the probation officer, who would produce a biography of him of about four, five, or six pages, legal experts said.
Such documents are confidential, intended only for the judge and the lawyers.
The court could agree to state Trump's sentence pending an appeal, That process would last beyond the November 5th presidential election.
But again, I highly doubt that they're going to stay Trump's sentence pending the appeal.
The only plausibility there is that if there were a sentence that were so short, that it would actually be shorter than the appeals process itself.
Maybe you delay the sentencing until after the appellate process goes forward.
Merchant's not gonna do that.
Given everything we know about Judge Merchant, who again, was out to get Trump from the beginning on this one.
Trump is not lying when he says that.
It is highly likely the merchant will move forward with the sentencing hearing.
Merchant could impose a financial penalty, require him to do community service, undergo counseling.
He could also impose home confinement, which would mean that Donald Trump would basically be confined to doing events in and around Mar-a-Lago in Florida.
It's also possible that he could just throw him in jail.
And no one knows what the hell happens then.
According to Forbes, in New York, classy felony sentences for offenders who have not been convicted of a felony within the last ten years, which would be Trump's situation, are doled out concurrently in thirds, such as one to three years, meaning that Trump could theoretically even if sentenced to the maximum here, which would be about four years, be eligible for parole, but only after a year.
If you were sentenced to a year or less, you would serve out his sentence in a city jail like Rikers, and then he would be eligible for parole after serving two-thirds of the sentence.
If he's sentenced to more than a year, the State Department of Corrections and Community Supervision will determine which of the 44 facilities he is sent to.
Secret Service has been gaming out this possibility, apparently, for months, as the New York Times reported.
If he ends up in prison, Secret Service would, theoretically, have to keep him separate from all the other inmates that have to screen his food and his personal items.
There'd be a detail of agents on him 24 hours a day.
The agents would, in fact, be armed.
All of this is insane.
The fact that we are even considering this is totally and utterly insane.
Again, we keep being told by the media the merchant is unlikely to sentence him to any jail time because he wouldn't want to be the man who puts the chief Republican candidate in prison.
I think precisely the reverse.
I think Democrats truly believe that if they throw Trump in jail, that the American people will surrender to the Biden administration.
And if that's the case, this is in fact a thwarting of basic standards of democracy.
To take a political opponent on trumped up charges, find him guilty, and then throw him in jail for purposes of the election is insanity.
It is third world crap.
It is insanity.
And that's presumably what we are talking about right now.
When we talk about the idea that a Manhattan DA, a politically motivated Manhattan DA, could go into his job with the purpose of convicting Donald Trump, that's what we are talking about.
Third world nonsense.
Not only that, the sentencing is going to be at least partially dependent on Trump's attitude.
So in the probation hearing, there are a few different factors
that are gonna be brought to play.
His age, his health, his likelihood to recommit an offense.
But one of the factors is remorse.
Now you see why that is.
Normally in a criminal case, if somebody commits a really, really dire crime
and they show no remorse, you can see why people would want them to be in jail.
But in this particular case, it's a catch-22 for Trump.
If he shows remorse for a crime he did not commit, then Biden just hammers him on that
And if he doesn't show remorse, then Merchant says, he committed a crime, I had to put a gag order on him, and then he didn't show remorse, so I'm throwing him in jail.
There is a very real possibility here that come November 5th, Donald Trump is sitting in Rikers while the American people are voting.
And if that's the case, the American people should vote for him all the more.
Because once again, this was a politically motivated prosecution.
The evidence was not there to support a conviction.
In fact, the charges were not even there to support a conviction.
That's why Merchant had to come up with this bizarre theory whereby four jurors could vote for one underlying crime, four jurors could vote for another underlying crime, and the last four could vote for a third underlying crime, and they could combine all of those into one giant felony that would serve as the predicate for the Class E felony for falsifying business records.
There's a high probability that this will be reversed either in the state or in the federal system.
It's certainly a violation of law in the state.
It's probably a violation of law federally because using the Federal Elections Funding Act to convict a guy in state court is bizarre.
Whatever the case, the Democrats just set the country on fire.
Alvin Bragg just set the country on fire.
I'm absolutely astonished that this trial was ever allowed to go forward.
I'm not particularly astonished at the verdict, but the consequences of this are extraordinarily dire, because play this one all the way out.
Let's say for a second that Donald Trump is sent to jail by one merchant, and let's say That while he is in jail, the election goes forth.
And under those conditions, he then loses the election.
If you think he was claiming rigging back in 2020, wait until you hear about 2024, when the Democrats charged him with a bunch of garbage, and then got 12 like-minded jurors to throw him in jail under the auspices of a glory-seeking judge, and took him completely off the campaign trail, and smeared him as a felon in advance of the election.
I mean, all the same people who are crying about Trump will be a tyrant.
Trump will, he will undermine the rule of law.
We cannot have a country with Donald Trump who will certainly destroy democracy.
It is hard for me to think of anything less democratic than trumping up a charge on your political opponent to jail him during an election cycle where you are currently losing, which is what Joe Biden is doing right now.
It's utter and complete insanity.
There is no precedent for it, obviously.
The only precedent for this in any way at all is Eugene V. Debs running for president from prison in 1920.
But that's not remotely this.
He was a third-party candidate with no shot of winning.
Donald Trump is currently leading in the polls.
He's the most likely person in America to be president of the United States right now.
Where do we go from here as a country?
Well, what the polling shows, by the way, is that a huge percentage of Americans will not change their vote based on this.
Certainly, Trump is not going to lose any of the Trump vote based on this.
Nobody is going to start shifting their vote away from Trump if they were already voting for Trump based on this.
A conviction would likely change very little.
According to Fox News, a new poll shows That regardless of whether Trump is found guilty or acquitted, the verdict would have no impact on voters' perception of the 2024 rematch.
Two-thirds of registered voters nationwide questioned in an NPR-PBS NewsHour Marist National Poll released on Thursday said that a guilty verdict in the trial would make no difference to their vote in the presidential election.
17% said a conviction of Trump would make them less likely.
15% said they'd be more likely to support Trump at the ballot box.
Again, only 9% Said that even if he was acquitted, they'd be less likely to vote for him.
Now, this is a really narrow election.
That's what makes this so astonishing.
I mean, it's astonishing for a thousand reasons, but one of the things that makes it so unbelievably astonishing is that this is an election that's going to come down to tens of thousands of votes in a handful of swing states again.
Right now, Donald Trump is leading outside the margin of error in Nevada, which means all he has to do is win Michigan or Pennsylvania and the election is over.
This thing could easily come down to two, three, 4,000 votes in one swing state.
And if Donald Trump were to lose in November, while serving prison time on a trumped up charge, the response in the United States will be absolutely explosive.
You want to talk about an illegitimate president at that point?
The American people will see a Democrat elected under those auspices as illegitimate.
There's just no other way to do it.
There's no other way to even see that.
Honestly, Joe Biden is going to come out, I am sure, and presumably he is going to make comments about the law having been done, no one being above the law, while simultaneously the DOJ attempted to broker a deal to save his own son from jail.
He himself was spared a prosecution on mishandling of classified documents because he was supposedly a doddering elderly man.
And he's going to lecture us about how the justice system just worked?
It did not.
The reverse.
Judge Merchant, for what it's worth, has now set July 11th for the sentencing.
So they're moving quite quickly.
A probation interview will be set for Trump, according to Jonathan Turley, who's in the courtroom.
All motions must be filed by June 13th.
Merchant was asking about bail status.
There is no bail, and everybody has left.
We'll bring you comment from the Trump camp as that comes in.
Meanwhile, we have Daily Wire reporter Spencer Lindquist.
He is live from the courthouse.
Spencer, tell me what it's like over there.
We've got a loud and chaotic scene right here.
We're just outside of the courthouse at a park just across the street here in New York City.
And it's been a mix today.
We've seen a lot of people coming out here to support President Trump.
And now it's a lot of people, of course, who are very, very happy that he's been convicted.
People are calling it a victory for democracy.
But I think something that is unmistakable is that today is a We've got a moment in our history right now that I think we're going to look back on with a lot of significance.
And everybody's turning now towards November to see what will this mean for the election?
What will this mean in this matchup against Biden?
Of course, that question is still one that has yet to be answered, but we're seeing a mix of emotions here on the ground in New York.
So Spencer, are we expecting to hear from the Trump camp sometime in the near future here?
I would assume that the parties are variously leaving the courthouse.
Trump obviously was not arrested inside the courtroom.
They have a sentencing hearing that's happening in about six weeks is what we are hearing.
Has there been any word where you are on when Trump will emerge and if he's going to say something to the press, which I assume he will?
I haven't heard anything regarding the specifics of the Trump comment or what he'll say.
But we do know that he's been very vocal throughout the course of this case.
He's been very vocal on his social media platform, through social.
And I believe we can expect him to continue to be very vocal.
Now that this case has ended, I believe he'll be speaking, I'm sure, before long.
But we're still awaiting the specifics on exactly when that might be.
Well, Spencer, really appreciate it.
We will check back in with you as time goes on.
If Donald Trump emerges, thanks for being there.
We'll be back with you momentarily.
All right, so coming up in a little bit, we're gonna have Harmeet Dhillon, constitutional lawyer.
She's done work with the Trump campaign as well to comment on what happens next, the impact on the election, the nature of this particular case.
We are now in uncharted territory.
There's never been anything like this in American history.
Merchant has thanked the jury, as far as we are being updated.
The Biden campaign has now released a statement.
Quote, in New York today, predicted moments ago, we saw that no one is above the law.
Is that what we saw?
Is that what we saw?
Donald Trump has always mistakenly believed he would never face consequences for breaking the law for his own personal gain.
But today's verdict does not change the fact the American people face a simple reality.
There is still only one way to keep Donald Trump out of the Oval Office, at the ballot box.
Convicted felon or not, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.
The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater.
He is running an increasingly unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution, pledging to be a dictator on day one, calling for our constitution to be terminated so he can regain and keep power.
A second Trump term means chaos, ripping away Americans' freedoms and fomenting political violence.
The American people will reject it in November.
That is the Biden campaign.
So definitely calming the waters right there by suggesting that tyranny is at hand if Trump is elected after Democrats, motivated by politics, jailed, are moving to jail.
The former president and possibly future president of the United States.
You want to talk about projection?
The Biden campaign suggesting that this is no one is above the law while Joe Biden sits there having been let off the hook by his own DOJ with his son.
They attempted to let his son off the hook, his DOJ.
Him sitting there and suggesting that Trump poses the threat to our democracy while a Manhattan district attorney pushes to jail This was a disgrace.
This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.
that the threat to our democracy is from Trump is totally insane.
It's totally, utterly, completely insane.
We do have Donald Trump's immediate response.
Here is what President Trump had to say upon emerging from the courthouse.
This was a disgrace.
This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.
It's a rigged trial, a disgrace.
They wouldn't give us a venue change.
We were at 5% or 6% in this district, in this area.
This was a rigged, disgraceful trial.
The real verdict is going to be November 5th by the people.
And they know what happened here, and everybody knows what happened here.
You have a sole respect DA and the whole thing.
We didn't do a thing wrong.
I'm a very innocent man and it's okay.
I'm fighting for our country.
I'm fighting for our constitution.
Our whole country is being rigged right now.
This was done by the Biden administration in order to wound or hurt an opponent, a political opponent.
And I think it's just a disgrace.
And we'll keep fighting.
We'll fight till the end and we'll win.
Because our country's gone to hell.
We don't have the same country anymore.
We have a divided mess.
We're nation in decline.
Syria's declined.
Millions and millions of people pouring into our country right now.
From prisons and from mental institutions, terrorists, and they're taking over our country.
We have a country that's in big trouble.
But this was a rigged decision right from day one with a conflicted judge who should have never been allowed to try this case.
Never.
And we will fight for our constitution.
This is long from over.
Thank you very much.
He ain't wrong.
Joining us online to discuss is Harmeet Dhillon.
She, of course, is the managing partner of Dhillon Law Group, and she's done work with the Trump campaign, particularly with regard to election law.
Harmeet, obviously this is an extraordinarily dark day in the history of the American Republic, unprecedented for a local prosecutor in Manhattan to pick up what really is a felony federal charge that was never tried, try to spin it into a state law charge, charge it 34 times, And then receive a conviction.
What do you make of the trial?
And then we'll get to what comes next.
Well, Ben, I'm almost at a loss for words.
This is an unprecedented day, as you've said, not just for our country, but for our legal system.
And what we saw in this case, this is the first time ever in New York state that falsification of records has been charged as a felony.
The statute of limitations is run.
The federal prosecutors, these state prosecutors previously, the FEC, Every agency that could have charged these crimes rejected them as not being crimes.
This is a Frankenstein case put together and life breathed into it by a judge who rigged it.
I'm not surprised when I heard that the jury came back with a verdict.
I knew what the verdict was going to be because the best case scenario here would have been that one honest juror would have looked at this steaming pile of dung and said, no, I cannot participate in this farce.
But the way the judge put blinders on the jury, the way the judge gave grossly improper jury instructions,
the way the judge refused to recuse himself, allowed prejudicial evidence to be had
and generally rigged this from day one.
This was a foregone conclusion almost.
And so, you know, what we have to do here is pray that the appeals process goes forward.
However, I do think that from a political standpoint, Ben, this has backfired bigly, as President Trump would say.
He is now more popular than he was at the beginning of this prosecution.
And I hope that the American people see this for what it is.
And we cannot let this stand in our country.
It reminds me of Pakistan.
It reminds me of the Middle East.
It reminds me of places where they don't have the rule of law.
And this is really a dangerous day for our country.
You know, Harmeet, this is obviously a kangaroo court situation.
We've all spent a lot of time following this trial.
The truth is that I personally didn't spend a lot of time on it because it's pretty clear as soon as they brought charges, no matter what it was, that Trump was going to get convicted.
I mean, this is simply picking a jurisdiction where people hate Donald Trump, bringing him up on literally anything.
Manufacturing some charge or another to spin it into a felony and then and then charging him with it.
And that was pretty clear from Judge Merchant's jury instructions, which when you go through in detail, I've never seen anything remotely like this.
I mean, you had a situation in which you had a misdemeanor that had run the statute of limitations with regards to falsification of business records.
That was kept alive by spinning the idea that that was a falsification on behalf of a second unspecified crime.
There were three theories that were put forward as to what that second unspecified crime was.
And Judge Murchin then informed the jury, they didn't even have to agree on what the underlying crime was, that the falsification of business records was supposed to be hiding, that they could actually divide 4-4-4 on those various crimes.
What I compared that to is that's sort of like saying that in a felony murder case where the murder is imputed to a person who didn't commit the murder based on the underlying felony that everybody was committing together, like robbing a bank, that there are actually like five felonies that are charged.
You don't have to agree.
The jurors don't have to agree on what the felony was.
It could be like one of five different felonies and they could vehemently disagree, but you could still charge somebody with felony murder.
I've never heard of unanimity by aggregation.
That seemed like a weird concept to me.
It's nonsense.
That's why you never heard of it.
Judges are ashamed to let such a thing pass, and prosecutors are ashamed to propose it.
I've never seen it proposed even.
And in a case, and there's a United States Supreme Court precedent that says that where there's a crime that requires a predicate act, the jury has to agree unanimously on what the predicate act is.
And in this case, there is no case, period, if there isn't a single felony that the jury agrees on unanimously.
What's also clear in this case, Ben, I mean, you know from being a lawyer yourself, that judges are normally embarrassed to be reversed.
That's one sort of social check that keeps them in place.
They're embarrassed that they might have a record that looks bad on appeal.
But in this case, the judge, I think, is fully aware that he's committed numerous acts of reversible error.
And he doesn't care.
I think the endgame for this judge is a lucrative book deal, TV slot with CNN, MSNBC.
His daughter continues to get big multimillion dollar payouts from her company.
And it's just upside for a political hack of a judge.
You know, that's the problem is that the normal breaks and social barriers that apply and speed bumps that apply in our country have been degraded over the last few years in this get Trump effort.
So, you know, I've been a lawyer for 31 years and I really question, you know, when you go into a court and you try to explain to a client how it's going to go, can you predict that anymore?
Because this is not a predictable outcome of a just legal system.
So, Harmeet, I think the big question on everybody's mind now is whether he's going to actually be sentenced by Judge Merchant to jail time.
I'd be shocked if he is not, considering the way that this trial has proceeded, considering what a mess the charges were in the first place.
It is obvious to me that if Merchant stops short of sending him to jail, he wouldn't be going all the way.
If he wants that lucrative book contract, he has to be the guy who sent Donald Trump to jail.
How do you think the sentencing goes?
Particularly because one aspect of the sentencing is that supposedly you get an easier sentence if you show remorse.
Trump literally cannot show remorse for a crime he did not commit because there's no crime alleged.
So how do you think that sentencing goes?
Yeah, I agree with you completely.
I think the judge's charter politically was throw the book at the sky, tie him up, embarrass him, humiliate him.
And by the way, hold the sentencing despite other cases that he's got going on.
week before the Republican National Convention to try to smear that as well.
And so the talking points from the Democrats, as they're going to be churning out in minutes,
will be the Republicans are nominating a convicted felon, you know, save our country, vote for
Joe Biden, who himself is, of course, in my opinion, guilty of many crimes that his DOJ
will never charge him or his son even for.
They're slapping them on the wrist with minor things with the son.
So, you know, we have to hope that the American voting public, first of all, will get out and vote and be outraged by this.
And be motivated.
As you pointed out in your intro, it's really not going to change.
If anything, it's going to strengthen the resolve of the MAGA voters.
But I think there are actually a lot more voters out there who are disgusted.
I've seen a lot of never-Trumper people I know in my social circles who say they're going to vote for President Trump as a result of this.
And so I think it may backfire.
But then you have to look at whether we have a fair election or not.
I don't think we had a fair election in 2020.
And so, you know, the rigging is going pretty deep here in our country.
I'm sorry to say that as an American, but I think I have very serious concerns about the justice system at this point.
And by the way, these judges at the state level are also the ones who determine elections.
And so if it happened in New York and Manhattan, you know that they're able to get to judges in other places as well.
So, Harmeet, what is the process for Trump's legal team now?
So, presumably there will be state appeals.
If this is a reversible error, I don't know what is.
There could be theoretical federal appeals based presumably on the idea that they charged a federal crime in a state court, which you're not supposed to do.
I mean, that's effectively what they convicted him based upon.
How do you see the appellate process playing out?
Do they try to go straight to federal court and try to get this to the Supreme Court?
Do they try to move through the state courts, which are typically rigged on behalf of Democrats in the state of New York?
Yeah, I mean, the normal process would be to go up to the Intermediate Court of Appeals in New York and then the Supreme Court of New York.
So there's two levels of appeal there.
We already have a hint from the fact that the campaign, the president rather, appealed the judge's failure to recuse himself, which he was statutorily required to do, given the personal financial interest of an immediate family member.
And the Court of Appeals let the case go forward under this judge.
So that's not a good sign for the intermediate level Court of appeals.
And typically, you're only able to take a federal appeal after you've exhausted your state remedies at the highest court, which is not going to happen, in my opinion, as a lawyer before the election.
You know, there are other things you could take extraordinary writs of habeas or such.
But, you know, until until they've got him in custody, I don't think they're going to be looking at that.
So, you know, I think it's going to wind its way through the system.
And eventually, if there are some honest judges along the way, this should get reversed on A dozen grounds.
I think that was I saw a reversible error on a daily basis following this trial.
So, you know, I think it makes him more popular, frankly, politically, putting back my political hat.
But this is a shameful day for American history.
And, you know, young people who are thinking about law school are going to look at this and say, do I want to be part of this system?
And, you know, so I think that's really degrading the rule of law and people's respect for law throughout the country, not just with respect to this case, because if you're willing to weaponize the entire That's Harmeet Dhillon.
She is a Dhillon Law Group.
Harmeet, appreciate the time.
Dark day for the country.
Thanks for your insight on all of this.
My pleasure.
in terms of level of magnitude of corruption.
And that's Harmeet Dhillon.
She is a Dhillon Law Group.
Harmeet, appreciate the time.
Dark day for the country.
Thanks for your insight on all of this.
My pleasure.
Thanks for having me.
Now let's talk about the political fallout of everything that is going on right here.
So, once again, the entire Biden campaign is predicated on the idea that Donald Trump cannot be allowed into high office.
Does this trial and the conviction, does that mean that Americans are more likely to see Trump as a threat to democracy?
I think the reverse.
I think that more people are going to look at this and see Joe Biden as a threat to democracy and his administration and Democrats.
Remember, Donald Trump in 2016 had crowds cheering, lock her up.
And you will remember that at the time the media and the Democrats suggested that this was tyrannical.
How could you say lock her up even though she had clearly committed crimes with regard to classified information?
How could you possibly say lock her up?
It was just tyrannical of Trump to suggest such a thing.
And then of course, Trump didn't do that.
Trump didn't move to lock her up.
He didn't, he didn't activate his DOJ to go after his political opponents.
And then, and by the way, that was after an election cycle in which the Obama FBI was literally investigating the Trump campaign.
Every weapon at the disposal of the federal government has now been launched at Donald Trump.
From the FBI in 2016, going after Carter Page, going after the Trump campaign, laundering Fusion GPS nonsense reports into the public eye, all the way up through the 2020 election cycle.
And now you have the justice system being mobilized by Democrats, motivated partisan Democrats to get Donald Trump.
Who's the threat to the democracy?
Who's the threat to America right now?
Is it the guy who has been targeted by all these institutions?
Or is it the people who have wielded these institutions and are wielding them in real time?
This is the insane.
We're now living in the insane asylum.
If you're waiting for politics to cool down, well, you picked the wrong time to be alive, apparently.
Joining us on the line is my quasi-friend Michael Knowles, who's been watching all of this with, I would say, a sufficient amount of outrage, given his Twitter account.
Michael, I've never, obviously, seen anything like this.
No one's ever seen anything like this.
It's truly a horrifying day for the country.
Horrifying.
On every possible level.
I have here on my desk a flag that was flying at Justice Alito's house, for which he got in trouble.
It's an American Revolutionary War flag.
It says, An Appeal to Heaven.
Supposedly, according to the left, to fly such a flag that was raised by George Washington and made by Jose de Camp, that makes us the insurrectionists and the threat to democracy.
You, of course, said it very, very well.
I think most people are going to look at this and say, the Democrats are the real threat to our political order.
And not just a threat.
They have impaled our political order.
We had a 234-year and four-month agreement not to prosecute presidents, former presidents, and major party nominees.
We just had never done that.
And so you got to ask yourself, why is it?
Did we not prosecute these people because they never commit crimes?
No, actually, they've committed plenty of crimes.
The current president has committed some crimes.
Two presidents ago, Barack Obama, he definitely committed some crimes.
So why have we not done it?
One of the reasons we've not done it is that it is not possible to have an impartial jury when you're talking about the top politician in the country.
Everybody has a view.
This is the chief executive.
This is a man who, in his person, represents the country and the spirit of the people.
So it can't happen, and it's always going to be kind of a kangaroo court, which is why, from the beginning, I think we all knew this was a kangaroo court.
It seemed very rigged.
The judge, Murshan in this case, seemed nakedly partisan and political.
The charges were basically incoherent.
One of them really should have been a federal charge.
One, is it a felony?
Is it a misdemeanor?
If it's a misdemeanor, it's actually past the statute of limitations.
But I didn't really care about any of the legal argument because of that fact that it's so obviously a political question.
So when I was looking at it this morning, We're all waiting for the results.
I said the only thing that is going to determine the outcome in this case is whether or not a secret conservative snuck onto the jury.
That's pretty much it.
If that person is pro-Trump, and I looked through, the New York Times did a little biography of each of the jurors, and I said, Well, that person says that she listens to religious podcasts.
Maybe?
I don't know.
This person, he lives on the Upper East Side, but he works in finance.
I don't know.
Maybe?
But there is no chance, right?
We're talking about Manhattan jurors.
I think Trump got about three votes in Manhattan in 2020.
The whole thing was a setup from day one.
And what's so sad about it is Trump might get a little political boost here in the sense that people are going to recognize this is unfair.
There was one poll on the federal case.
62% of Americans view the federal charges as being primarily politically motivated.
So people know what's up in America.
But from the historical perspective, you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
235 years almost of an agreement not to behave like a banana republic, a tin pot dictatorship that is out the window.
Democrats did it and it can't be undone.
Well, President Biden apparently will not address Trump's conviction tonight.
So apparently they weren't able to get a hold of enough Adderall to get him up and in front of a TV.
He has made a statement, as we mentioned earlier, in which he talked about how now everyone is being accountable before the law, which is an incredible statement from a man who clearly violated classified documents law himself and was openly held to have done so.
By the DOJ lawyer, Robert Herr, who literally said the only reason that he didn't prosecute him is because he's a senile old dodder.
That's literally what he says.
And now he's out there saying that, obviously, the real threat to democracy is the guy who is being convicted of crimes that don't exist in a Democrat courtroom.
This is the part that is truly astonishing.
And I think that you are going to see An enormous consolidation around Trump, certainly people who are lukewarm on Trump.
Maybe the people who supported Nikki Haley at the end of the primaries or people who are DeSantis supporters and we're still kind of waiting to jump all the way back on the Trump bandwagon.
That's over now.
You're going to get 100% adherence to Trump on the right.
But I think independents, too, are going to look at this and they are going to say that Donald Trump is being victimized here.
He's clearly being victimized here.
And a certain Weird political way.
I think this is quite good for Trump because one of the things is that Trump likes to talk about Trump.
I mean, that's just the reality of who Donald Trump is as a candidate.
Well, there were only really two topics on which he was speaking in the past few months.
One was the January 6th, 2020 election stuff, and two were the trials.
And the trials, it's fine for him to talk about.
That is a fine political thing for him to talk about because there you are talking about the serious issue of one party mobilizing the instruments of government in order to victimize members of the opposing party.
And that is a much better campaign for him to run than anything related to 2020.
I mean, if they get to a debate and Joe Biden says January 6th was a threat to democracy, Donald Trump should say, and I'm sure he will, you mobilizing every piece of the Justice Department from state to federal in order to convict your political opponent in advance of an election you're losing, that seems to be much more of a threat to democracy than anything that I've done.
I mean, I think the door is wide open on Biden and team because of this conviction.
I mean, this is the astonishing point here, is that they really thought that by convicting Trump, they were going to finish his candidacy.
And instead, all they've done is create just another label they can throw at him.
But what they've really done is shape Americans' perceptions of them.
Like right now, I want to get your take on this, Michael.
I'm hearing a lot of people out there on the right, and they're like, well, you know, Republican D.A.
should start immediately indicting Democratic politicians.
I don't think that's right.
Because I think the American people don't like what they're seeing.
If the American people were fine with what they're seeing, I think that that's totally right.
Because I think what's good for the goose is good for the gander.
But I actually think that this is a political win for Republicans in the sense that they're not the party tearing down democracy right now, it is the Democrats who are inciting their political opponents, dragging them up in blue areas where they don't even live, and then threatening them with jail time.
By the way, I think...
I think Murchin is going to sentence him to jail.
I think that you can't... I think Chekhov's gun must be used.
I think that if you get this far, if you're Murchin, you're going to go all this way.
I don't think you go all this way just to sentence him to probation.
If you come at the king, you best not miss, to quote The Wire, who is quoting more elegant sources.
Of course, of course Murchin has to sentence him to jail.
And I agree with you that...
Politically, this looks good.
The Democrats are stepping on a rake and Trump can be a martyr and sort of is a martyr now.
I think it's totally legitimate.
What worries me, though, is how brazen this is and how increasingly brazen the Democrats have become.
That can have a positive political effect for them as well, because it can demoralize conservatives.
So, yes, conservatives are going to rally around Trump, and independents are going to rally around Trump, and everyone's going to be outraged by this, but they did it.
They did it, and they're getting away with it, at least for now, just like they got away with changing a lot of election rules.
Uh, in some cases in contravention of state constitutions, let's say like in Pennsylvania.
Just like they got away with spying on the Trump campaign.
Just like they got away with undermining his administration and arresting some of his associates.
Just like they get away with this and that and this and that and they never pay a consequence for it.
We were talking about the crimes that Joe Biden has apparently committed.
Just two days ago, he visited Hallie Biden, the widow of his son and former mistress of his other son.
This was days before the Hunter Biden gun crimes trial.
Hallie Biden is going to be an important witness in the gun crimes trial because allegedly she seems to have helped him to commit those crimes.
Any reasonable person looking at that meeting says, that's witness tampering.
One of the things that you're accusing Donald Trump of doing, you, sitting President Biden, are doing yourself.
And what do they do?
They shrug their shoulders, he licks his ice cream cone, and they don't care.
So yes, this will mobilize public opinion against Biden.
The really demoralizing question is, how much does public opinion still matter in elections?
Yeah, Michael, as you say, you know, when it comes to the glass being broken, you can't unbreak this glass.
It is worth noting at this point that if Joe Biden does not win this next election, he will undoubtedly be prosecuted.
Undoubtedly.
I mean, we have now, but this is not glass that goes back in place.
I mean, the reality is that he is now running to basically keep himself and his son out of jail.
So you now have a political system in which people who are running for the presidency have to first consider whether they are going to be unfairly brought up on charges, and then they have to consider that if they lose, there's a good shot they go to jail.
I mean, that is where we currently sit.
Now, listen, there are other democracies around the world Where there have actually been sitting politicians who have ended up in jail after losing office, after being elected to high office or whatever it is.
But in those particular cases, those cases happen to be incredibly well-founded.
What makes this such a travesty is that it was so incredibly not well-founded from the very get-go, from the beginning.
This was the weakest of any of the cases being brought against President Trump.
And what it really says is that if you get the January 6th trial in Washington, D.C., he'll get convicted there.
Yeah.
If you're down in Florida in the classified documents trial, probably a hung jury.
If you're over in Atlanta, depending on the jury selection, probably gets convicted.
This is now a game of simple forum shopping.
This happens all the time in civil litigation.
You try to find the forum where the jury is going to be most available to you.
But if you're a national candidate like Donald Trump, and you're being brought up in four different jurisdictions on four different sets of charges, It's completely dependent on the nature of the population in the area in which you are being charged, which makes a mockery of justice.
That's not one standard for all.
That is, do they like you?
Essentially, it makes a referendum on you electorally, except if you lose the election, you go to jail.
Exactly.
You're talking about the chief skill and charge of a politician, which is to go out and get people to like them.
Well, we have a venue for that.
That takes place within the legislature and the elections for legislators and for the presidency.
That's not supposed to take place in the judicial branch.
You know, understood from a philosophical standpoint, the three branches of government are supposed to correspond to the tripartite soul.
The legislature is supposed to be the passionate, emotional, repetitive part.
The executive is supposed to be the spirited part, the thematic part of the soul.
But the judicial part of the government is supposed to be logical, disinterested.
Cool.
Lady Justice with a blindfold on.
And I don't think any person today, even the most partisan Democrat, would be able to look you in the face and tell you sincerely that Lady Justice still has her blindfold on.
Not a chance.
Well, Michael Mulls, go take a listen to The Michael Mulls Show.
Really, thanks for your commentary and terrible day for the country.
Try and have a Mayflower cigar and relax a little bit before you pop a blood vessel over there.
Yeah.
Appreciate the time.
Thanks, Ben.
Okay.
Meanwhile, the Trump campaign has dropped a new ad.
Presumably theorizing that they were going to be convicted, that Trump was going to be convicted in this case.
Here is the new Trump campaign ad on this basis.
Thank you for joining us here today.
you Earlier this afternoon, Donald Trump was arraigned by a Manhattan grand jury on 34 felony counts.
This case is an abomination.
You know, it's obviously political.
Seven years to try to come up with this case.
They're just wrong on the law.
The only crime that Donald Trump is being prosecuted for is the crime of running for president.
Political persecution at the highest level.
They've quite frankly given up on trying to beat him at the polls.
Either going to steal it or stop it by law firm.
A Democrat prosecutor elected on a get Trump platform.
What's going on here is a disgusting disgrace.
It is war on Trump.
It is war on the Republican Party.
And it is a war on the Republicans.
This case is the weakest case I've seen in 60 years of teaching, practicing, and writing about criminal law.
I doubt the New York indictment would have been brought against a defendant whose name was not Donald Trump.
This judge, I mean, you don't need a prosecutor if you have a judge like this.
This judge is not on the level.
It's a terrible case, but the judge has been pretty much a rubber stamp on everything that Bregg has wanted to do.
They're perverting the system of justice.
That's where the danger lies.
The corruption and subversion of our institutions by the left.
This is the Democrats' entire strategy to confine President Trump to a dirty criminal courtroom and keep him off the campaign trail.
And this is going to be the theme for Trump the rest of the election cycle.
So here's what you've got if you are Joe Biden.
You have a DOJ that has beclowned itself in a thousand ways.
You have two separate courts of law in the state of New York that have put forward absurd, absurd verdicts.
Absurd verdicts in this particular case and absurd verdicts in the civil case that was brought by the woman that he supposedly defamed and was sentenced to $500 million or something ridiculous in terms of defamation.
So you have those two.
You have three separate federal cases that are being brought by the DOJ in three separate jurisdictions.
And Joe Biden is sitting at the head, being the president, and being terrible at it.
You have baked into the cake inflation.
You have a giant fire in the Middle East.
You have a giant fire in Ukraine.
Total dissolution of the social fabric of the country.
And this is supposed to make things better?
What do you run on if you're Joe Biden?
You run on the fact that Donald Trump is a very bad man.
He's gonna do very bad things.
You just did the bad thing.
You and your friends just did the bad thing.
Letitia James, the AG in New York, literally ran for office, pledging that she would get Donald Trump.
Alvin Bragg pledged that he would get Donald Trump.
Judge Merchant is a political actor.
Merrick Garland is a political actor.
Joe Biden is obviously a political actor.
Governor of Rhonda Sands of Florida put out a statement He says, it is often said that no one is above the law, but it is also true that no one is below the law.
If the defendant were not Donald Trump, this case would never have been brought, the judge would never have issued similar rulings, and the jury would never have returned a guilty verdict.
That is obviously true.
Ironically, Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and get away with it.
Ironically, in the city of New York, he would be more likely to get away with murdering someone on Fifth Avenue than with a minor supposed business misdemeanor.
Because murder in New York is presumably okay.
You can throw somebody on the subway tracks in New York.
That won't be prosecuted.
Or they put you in jail for a moment, let you out without bail.
Or, theoretically, you could just be Donald Trump with business interests in New York, and they will come after you.
The Trump website is experiencing so much traffic right now that it has crashed.
So many people are attempting to give to the Trump campaign that the website has now timed out.
It has now crashed.
The top issue in this election has now become should administrations and political parties target their political opponents for destruction?
This is open Watergate is what this is.
Watergate is considered the worst scandal in American political history because the Nixon administration, the Nixon campaign, Greenland, the bugging, of the George McGovern offices in 1972.
What if Nixon had just said, I get to do whatever I want to George McGovern, include bringing him up on charges that are completely specious and then brag about how he's a convicted felon.
What about that?
You want to talk about impacting an election in dire and unforeseen ways.
This is that.
How do you not suggest that Joe Biden and his cronies are tyrannical in going after Donald Trump on a specious charge like this?
And it is utterly specious.
Again, they didn't even go after him on a January 6th charge on this one.
I mean, this isn't just playing with fire, it's playing with extraordinary fire, because either way this goes, it's a disaster area now.
If Donald Trump wins the election on this basis, he could very well be serving as president from a New York City jailhouse.
And if Donald Trump loses, if he loses, having been jailed by his political opponents, Man, oh man.
Things are going to get extraordinarily ugly.
Extraordinarily ugly.
It's truly a sad day for the country.
Truly, truly a sad day for the country.
How are people going to respond in the swing states?
I can't imagine that they are going to respond particularly well.
I cannot imagine that most Americans are going to look at this and feel like Donald Trump had this one coming.
And presumably, all the Republicans are thinking from here on in is that Donald Trump should lock her up.
That if Donald Trump becomes president, he should do exactly what Joe Biden just did.
If this is the new norm in America, that is not good for the country.
Alrighty, folks.
We'll be back here in short order to bring you more.
We will break more of this down as the news breaks.
An unprecedented day in the country.
Pray for the Republic because something truly terrible just happened in New York City.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
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