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May 31, 2024 - The Ben Shapiro Show
51:40
Trump CONVICTED Of 34 Felonies. Pray For The Republic.
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Last night, in a historic breach of all historical norms, in a move that really does put the Republic on the precipice of serious constitutional disorder, chaos, and disaster, a jury in New York found, unanimously, that Donald Trump was guilty of 34 separate felonies, all stemming from hush money payments that were made to Stormy Daniels all the way back in 2016.
Now, the legal case is an atrocity.
It's a ridiculous, ridiculous case.
We're going to go through all the details in a moment.
It was a political put-up job by Manhattan D.A.
Alvin Bragg, who came into office pledging to get Donald Trump, not pledging to find his criminal behavior that was actually criminal, pledging to get Donald Trump under any circumstances.
And that, of course, mirrored the language of Attorney General Letitia James, who was elected to her position in the state of New York on the basis of, quote-unquote, getting Donald Trump.
It was a put-up job by the judge, Juan Marichan, who clearly wants Trump behind bars, which is why I believe that he's probably going to sentence him to jail time come July.
I do not think that Chekhov's gun can sit above that mantelpiece for the entirety of the second act here.
This was a put-up job by the Biden administration, which has been attempting to brand Donald Trump a criminal and a felon since literally the day that they got into office.
And the Democratic Party, which has been attempting to label him everything from a Putin cat's paw to a traitor to the country since 2015.
It all culminated yesterday in a jury finding, in the most ridiculous possible criminal case, that Donald Trump was guilty of 34 felonies.
It's an absurd case.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Trump was found guilty Thursday by a New York jury on all 34 counts in his hush money case, concluding the first ever criminal trial of a former president.
Now voters will render their own judgment as Trump, the presumptive GOP presidential nominee, barrels ahead to the November 5th election, using the trial and other prosecutions he faces as a rallying cry for his supporters.
President Trump, for his part, responded to the verdict.
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.
in the immediate aftermath of the verdict.
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.
There's no question that this is political.
None whatsoever.
The basis of the charges is trash.
This is a trash case that was brought in a jurisdiction unfriendly to Donald Trump with a prosecutor who obviously wanted to make his bones on Donald Trump's back and a judge who wants to be famous based on convicting Donald Trump.
This was, in fact, a put-up job.
Todd Blanch, one of Trump's attorneys, he made the point that the timing of this most recent grand jury is quite suspicious.
It turns out That it's kind of weird to file a misdemeanor charge, which is really what this was, a misdemeanor business records falsification charge that expired in 2017.
In 2023, as Donald Trump was securing the Republican nomination for the presidency.
Here is Todd Blanch, one of Trump's attorneys.
I will say that the timing of this most recent grand jury, meaning the 2023 grand jury that ultimately indicted President Trump, kicked into action less than two months after President Trump announced he was running for re-election.
And there are coincidences, and then there's coincidences, and I don't think that that's just something that happened.
Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan DA who brought this case, had pledged back in 2021 that he was going to find some rationale for prosecuting Donald Trump.
He said, quote, I'm the candidate in the race who has the experience of Donald Trump.
I was the chief deputy in the attorney general's office.
We sued the Trump administration over 100 times for the Muslim travel ban,
for family separation at the border, for shenanigans with the census.
So I know how to litigate with him.
I also led the team that did the Trump Foundation case.
So I'm ready to go wherever the facts take me and to inherit that case.
I think it'd be hard to argue with the fact that'd be the most important, most high-profile case, and I've seen him up front and seen the lawlessness he could do.
And he was then asked by a reporter, you believe that should happen?
He said, I believe we have to hold him accountable.
Okay, he was pledging to do this in 2021, and then he did it.
And then he did it!
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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Here was Alvin Bragg yesterday responding to the guilty verdict.
And again, a Manhattan courtroom that was stacked from the start.
While this defendant may be unlike any other in American history, we arrived at this trial
and ultimately today at this verdict in the same manner as every other case
that comes through the courtroom doors.
By following the facts and the law and doing so without fear or favor.
That is an extraordinary lie.
An extraordinary lie.
There's never been a case.
This is a novel legal theory that was brought to court by Alvin Bragg specifically to get Donald Trump before the election.
That's all this was.
Everybody knows this.
Independents know this.
Democrats know this.
When Democrats say that all they want is the law followed without fear or favor, it's weird how you're perfectly fine with James Comey letting Hillary Clinton off the hook for obvious criminal conduct in 2016 with the excuse, while she was running for president, we don't want election interference.
And then it turns out that you're totally fine with Donald Trump being prosecuted for absolute trash of charges stemming from activities sexually back in the mid-2000s and then from a hush money payment made in 2016.
Meanwhile, you're apparently perfectly fine with the DOJ letting Joe Biden, the current president of the United States, off the hook, even though he clearly involved himself in criminal conduct, in terms of mishandling classified material, because he's a doddering old fool, who then goes out, by the way, and rips the prosecutor for mentioning that he's a doddering old fool, and in the process, shows himself to be even more of a doddering old fool.
You are totally fine, apparently, if you're a Democrat, with the DOJ originally trying to cut such an extraordinary sweetheart deal with the president's son, that it was only scuttled when a judge looked at it and said, what the hell is this?
That is the only reason that Hunter Biden is being brought up on charges now.
It's because a judge looked at the original sweetheart deal brought by Merrick Garland's DOJ and said this is so obviously corrupt that there's no way I can greenlight this prosecution deal.
As far as the political obviousness of the situation, remember that one of the big prosecutors in this case was a person named Matthew Colangelo.
The DNC paid Matthew Colangelo 12 grand in January 2018 for political consulting He donated to Barack Obama's first presidential campaign in 2008.
He was the third-ranking official at President Biden's Justice Department.
He then joined Manhattan D.A.
Alvin Bragg's office in December 2022.
And just a few months later, they launched this current investigation into Donald Trump.
That indictment began in March 2023.
So he moved from the Biden DOJ to Alvin Bragg's office.
And three months later, the indictment was brought against Donald Trump.
And we're supposed to believe there was no coordination, that Joe Biden knew nothing about.
This is just the workings of the gears of justice.
That's all this is.
Meanwhile, the judge, Mayor Sean, obviously a partisan Democrat.
He's donated small amounts before to the Biden presidential campaign in 2020, as well as to ActBlue, which is an activist group.
His daughter is a Democratic activist as well.
The reality is that she serves as president of Authentic Campaigns, a firm that does digital campaign work like online fundraising, and they work with Democratic political candidates.
Not only that, she was apparently the director of digital persuasion for now-Vice President Kamala Harris's 2020 presidential campaign, according to CNN.
So you have a partisan Democrat judge, a partisan hack prosecutor, and a set of charges that are just garbage.
And the Wall Street Journal has likened this to a turducken of a case.
I've heard other people, including my friend Megan Kelly, refer to it as Russian nesting dolls.
To understand the charges in this case, you have to understand that, effectively speaking, it is an onion of charges, and at the center, there is nothing.
That is all.
You actually get to the end of the Russian nesting doll, or the end of the turducken, and it's just a vacuum of space.
Let's be real about this.
Alvin Bragg brought a misdemeanor charge of falsification of business records that is past the statute of limitations.
The only way that he could spin that into a chargeable offense and extend the statute of limitations is to charge it as a felony.
The problem is there is no underlying felony.
So the underlying felony that he actually ended up charging was a federal felony.
State prosecutors do not have jurisdiction to charge federal felonies.
Unbelievably enough, the same exact Biden administration that is insisting that states cannot enforce federal law because of federalism have no problem with the Manhattan D.A.
enforcing federal election finance law that has been already investigated and Trump has not been indicted on anything election related.
They apparently are fine with a state D.A., a Manhattan D.A., going after Donald Trump on a federal election charge.
He has no jurisdiction over these issues, none.
Andrew McCarthy has been writing about this for, obviously, since the initiation of this mess.
He says that payments that were made to Karen McDougal, who is a person that Trump schtupped and then paid hush money payments via David Pecker to, or Stormy Daniels, or to a bellman at his building because there was some sort of false allegation that Donald Trump had fathered a child out of wedlock, which wasn't true, but they made a payoff.
In legalese, says McCarthy, these payments were legal consideration for entering into
nondisclosure agreements. NDAs are common, lawful, a staple of civil law settlements.
Alvin Bragg claims that the NDA payments were illegal because they were essentially campaign
contributions that exceeded the federal dollar amount limits. There's a problem with this. NDAs.
Paying somebody for an NDA, which is common practice.
Every settlement basically ends with an NDA.
Every single legal settlement, from employment law to contract law, every single legal settlement ends with an NDA and money being paid.
Whether it's hush money payments like this one, or again, whether it's in any other context.
That doesn't make it an election contribution.
Bradley Smith, who's the former FEC chairman, originally appointed to the FEC by Bill Clinton, He wrote, quote, a businessman candidates intent to protect
his public image before an election by settling a lawsuit or other potential legal claim,
paying to have old divorce records sealed, settling up contested debts, none of which he has an
obligation to pay before or after becoming a candidate, does not make these payments campaign
expenditures. If it did, many more politicians than Trump would be in trouble. If the idea is that
anything that affects an election is now a campaign expenditure, that would also have
consequences the other way.
You could literally label your gym workouts campaign expenditures because obviously how you look has an impact on the campaign trail.
The idea that anything that has any impact on the election now becomes an election-related expense is totally nuts and unprecedented in American law.
But effectively, the judge allowed Bragg to bring these illegal charges Not only that, the judge then stacked the trial by effectively allowing Alvin Bragg to argue that Trump had already been convicted of some violation of election law, even though he hadn't.
So how exactly did he do that?
Well, Michael Cohen was brought forward, Trump's former attorney and convicted perjurer.
And Cohen had already pled guilty to campaign crimes because he thought that was going to allow him to cut a deal with prosecutors to go after Trump.
We'll get some more on this in just one second.
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So what happened here?
Well, typically, prosecutors are not allowed to bring in history of criminal conduct of witnesses.
That's typically not something that happens very often.
Usually it's the defense that attempts to bring that in and the judge rules on whether that's relevant or not.
Here, the prosecutors decided to bring in Cohen's criminal history with regard to campaign finance.
Why?
Because what they wanted to say is that Cohen had pled guilty to campaign finance violations On Trump's behalf, which meant Trump was actually guilty of a crime even though Trump has never even been charged with a federal election crime.
As McCarthy says, even though prosecutors are not supposed to use Cohen's guilty pleas to argue that Trump is guilty of campaign crimes, that's exactly what they did and Merchant let them do it.
The judge then barred Trump from arguing he is innocent because he was never charged by the federal authorities.
Mershan, reasons that Trump's non-prosecution is irrelevant because the feds may have dropped the case for reasons having nothing to do with whether Trump was guilty.
But then how exactly do you admit Cohen's guilty plea in the elections case?
Or Pecker, AMI's non-prosecution and conciliation agreements?
They had big incentives to cut those deals without admitting guilt, but they're still being brought in to prove Trump's guilt.
So Trump has never tried on these charges, federal election charges.
He's never even indicted on those charges.
So how exactly does Alvin Bragg make his case?
He brings in associates of Trump's who have pled guilty to crimes and then used their guilty pleas as an excuse to say that Trump was guilty.
of the same sort of crime and therefore you can wrap a misdemeanor around a crime that he was not convicted of or charged with and turn that into a felony for purposes of New York state law.
It's totally wild.
Again merchants didn't even allow Bradley Smith to testify.
Trump's team wanted to bring Bradley Smith in to explain federal election law which is the predicate for this entire nonsense trial and the judge said no.
So this thing was rigged from the start.
Listen, this trial was over the same way that the O.J.
trial was over the minute it moved from Brentwood to downtown L.A.
because of the jury pool.
That was true in this case.
The minute that this was a case that was initiated in Manhattan, this case was over.
Trump's team knew it.
So all of the kind of heartburn over Trump's team mishandling this or Trump mishandling this because he should have just admitted that, of course, he paid these women off and it had nothing to do with violation of federal election law or anything like that.
It wouldn't have made one bit of difference.
This jury was rigged from the start.
It was meant to be rigged.
The judge rigged this thing along with the prosecutors.
Trump is correct to point that out.
And this is, in fact, a cataclysmic circumstance for the country.
Because when you have the chief political rival of the President of the United States being brought up by allies of the President of the United States in a court on spurious charges, charging with felonies, specifically, said the entire media can then claim that he's a convicted felon and so can Joe Biden.
When that happens, you are looking at incipient tyranny.
What is the outcome of this going to be now?
If Donald Trump is put in jail, which could actually happen here, he could be in jail at the time of the election.
If that actually happens, or even if he's under house arrest, how exactly, if Donald Trump then loses the election, will anyone believe that that's a legitimate representation of the will of the American people?
This case is a fraud.
It was always a fraud.
Democrats are playing with fire.
They don't seem to care if they burn down every institution in the country in order to get at Donald Trump.
They don't seem to care if they blow up the law in order to get at Donald Trump.
The most important thing is getting Donald Trump.
And then they have the temerity to project that Donald Trump is the threat to democracy?
That's the case that they keep making?
Donald Trump is the threat to democracy?
The Biden-Harris campaign put out a statement.
They said, in New York today, we saw that no one is above the law, which is just the sickest thing.
What we actually saw today and yesterday is that Donald Trump, it's not about him being above the law.
It is that the law will be applied to him in ways that it has never been applied to anyone else.
The great irony of this is that Donald Trump once bragged that he could shoot somebody on Fifth Avenue and he wouldn't lose any support.
Well, I mean, the truth is, if you had shot somebody on Fifth Avenue, Alvin Bragg may have let him off the hook, because the rule in New York is you murder someone by throwing them in front of a subway train, and you might get out on no bail.
But apparently, if you commit a misdemeanor records error in 2015 or 2016 or 2017, they'll bring you up a decade later on charges.
The Biden-Harris campaign said in New York today we saw no one is above the law, except of course for Joe Biden, who is above the law, and Hunter Biden, who was above the law until a judge scuttled that deal.
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 that 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, says the Biden campaign, Trump will be the Republican nominee for president.
The threat Trump poses to our democracy has never been greater.
Our democracy, trademark, has never been greater.
He's 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, ribbing Americans' freedoms and fomenting political violence.
The American people were ejected this November.
That last paragraph is one of the greatest examples of projection I've ever seen in my life.
Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, who have trumped up a series of charges in four separate jurisdictions against Donald Trump.
They say the threat Trump poses to democracy has never been greater.
Can we be clear about this?
Trump is the threat to democracy?
Here is just a short list of ways in which Joe Biden is a threat to our democracy.
One, he and his party have activated apparatchiks at the state level to use federal charges over which they have no jurisdiction to attempt to jail his political opponent who's currently leading him in the swing states in the polls.
Two, he activated his DOJ to target Donald Trump in three separate jurisdictions.
Three.
That same DOJ was activated in order to scuttle a case against Joe Biden and scuttle a case against Hunter Biden.
He tried to use OSHA to force 80 million Americans to vaccinate against their will.
He defies the Supreme Court on a regular basis by alleviating student loan debt in violation of law and then brags about it.
He continues to falsely claim in front of black audiences that if he loses, it will be because Republicans suppress the vote, which is a lie.
It is a blatant, outright, anti-democratic lie.
And Joe Biden tells it every day, and the media continue to massage his shoulders over it.
He keeps attacking the Supreme Court over and over and over, their legitimacy.
Claiming that particular justices are corrupt.
He and his party have been saying this for years.
He has used government agencies to threaten social media companies repeatedly.
He has attacked states for enforcing border law.
He has used federal predominance over border law to keep the border wide open.
But Donald Trump is the tyrant?
Are you kidding me?
And that statement from Joe Biden is just an astonishing one.
He's running an unhinged campaign of revenge and retribution?
You literally are running your entire campaign on Donald Trump is a threat to our democracy and he must be stopped by any means necessary because if not, the country will end.
Calling for our constitution to be terminated?
Donald Trump never did that.
The comment that he made on Truth Social was about how, by stealing elections, Democrats were effectively terminating the Constitution.
The only person who's been in strong violation of the Constitution repeatedly is Joe Biden.
I'll get to more on this in just a moment.
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A second Trump term means chaos.
Have you looked around lately, Joe?
A little chaotic out there, don't you think?
The Middle East is on fire.
Ukraine is on fire.
Taiwan is being routinely threatened by China.
Inflation has raged out of control for three plus years, increasing prices from when you took office by 20% basically across the board and in some areas by 80 or 90%.
Our economy is stagnating.
Our social fabric is ripped, and in the middle of this you throw the lit fuse bomb that your political opponent might be jailed, and yet you have the temerity to say that this is about upholding the law?
It's a joke!
And then you have Hillary Clinton, who, honest to God, if Democrats want Donald Trump to win, I'm not sure how they can do better than by continuing to trot out Hillary Clinton.
Hillary Clinton yesterday, in the aftermath of this, she comes out a-grinning.
This federal law violator herself, let off corruptly by James Comey, who literally rewrote the charges in order to let her off in 2016.
By the way, that's the original sin.
If Hillary Clinton had been prosecuted by James Comey in 2016, none of this would have happened.
None of it.
She would have lost the election.
It would have been clear that politicians can, in fact, be prosecuted for crimes they commit.
And none of this would have arisen.
Certainly not a belief, a correct belief by one side of the aisle, that the other side of the aisle is perfectly willing to use the methodologies of legalism in order to destroy candidates on the basis of non-violation of law.
Trotting out Hillary Clinton to laugh and scoff over this, it's disgusting.
Here she was yesterday.
Thank you.
She gets big cheers because Trump is being convicted.
Thank you so much.
Anything going on today?
Everybody very excited.
They don't give a... Ask them to name the charges or describe them.
They don't know.
They don't care.
They just want Trump in jail.
That's all.
And they're cheering for her.
For her, this criminal.
Well, I have to tell you, there's nowhere I'd rather be than right here.
Hey, she then started pumping out merch.
This is so... You want to destroy the democracy, you can sell some coffee cups.
She started pumping out merch on her Twitter saying it turns out she was right about everything.
And it's a picture, a silhouette of Hillary Clinton drinking a cup of tea.
She was right about everything?
She wasn't right about handling classified documents.
She bleach bit her own hard drive to avoid culpability on that one.
And apparently that was totally fine.
But they'll throw Donald Trump in jail for hush money payments because he shook the porn star back in like 2006.
This whole thing is insane.
The media, of course, are truly ecstatic about all of this.
Left-wing anchors can't get it out of their mouth.
They're just going to say convicted felon over and over, which is, of course, exactly what Democrats want.
And they believe that if they call Trump a convicted felon over and over while grinning, that the American public will buy it.
I don't think this is going to go the way they think this is going to go.
We've been holding our breath as a country for a long time waiting for the cavalry to arrive in the form of the rule of law and it did arrive today and it's a majestic day.
Donald Trump is a convicted felon.
A convicted felon.
Could they be more excited?
Could they?
Again, it was all about getting Trump.
It was never about the crimes that he supposedly committed.
Never, ever, ever.
Bill Clinton committed worse crimes in terms of covering up sexual activity than Donald Trump ever did.
He committed actual perjury for which he was never charged.
While being President of the United States, by the way.
Doesn't matter.
This was all about getting Trump.
It was all about using the methodologies of the law in order to get Donald Trump, even if it meant perverting the law.
And the media's response to this?
They have no idea what they've unleashed right now.
They really don't know what they've unleashed.
Hollywood celebrities, too, are super excited.
All of them, just ecstatic.
Tears of joy, said emotional Kathy Griffin, according to Breitbart.
God bless New York City, said Ellen Barkin.
We are all cheering for justice and that no one is above the law, said John Leguizamo.
Ask any of them to analyze these charges.
They have no idea what Trump was charged with or for.
They don't care.
Barbara Streisand said they must not allow this felon anywhere near the White House again.
And the celebrities couldn't be more excited.
Bette Midler, guilty on all charges.
Rob Reiner, guilty!
Linda Carter, former Wonder Woman.
34 is now my favorite number.
Stephen King, the Republican candidate for president is a convicted felon.
Okay, you got the label that you wanted.
But are you going to be able to stop him?
Are you going to be able to stop him?
That is the big question.
So, what would stop him?
Because if he's convicted, but he doesn't go to jail, what impact is that going to have on the election?
Everything washes out.
He was the first ex-president who had been charged in multiple jurisdictions.
And that has had no impact on the polls.
What the polls show is that most Americans don't think this makes any difference at all.
We'll get to more on this in just one second.
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According to an NPR PBS NewsHour Marist poll, over two-thirds of people said a guilty verdict would make no difference to their vote.
About 1 in 6 voters said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to vote for Trump.
However, 15% said they would be more likely to vote for Trump if he was hit with a guilty verdict.
Only 11% of independents said a guilty verdict would make them less likely to vote for Trump.
And less likely, by the way, does not mean won't vote for Trump.
Like barrier to entry.
If this campaign comes down to Joe Biden calling Trump a convicted felon and Donald Trump saying, you're a terrible president, you're awful at this, and by the way, you're a tyrant who activates the methods of law enforcement to target your political opponents, Trump is going to win.
Ironically, politically, this is probably quite good for Trump.
That at least is the case that Senator Marco Rubio is making.
He happens to be correct.
Here's the senator from Florida.
Senator Rubio, thanks for joining us.
Your reaction?
I mean, they just elected Donald Trump president, so politically, I think it's good.
I think, unfortunately, they've made a travesty, a mockery of our criminal justice system.
I think all over the world right now, they're watching news reports and they're saying, what's America sending to us?
Meaning these third world countries, these dictatorships, these crazy places.
I mean, I don't know what I can add to what people have already seen.
This is all absurd, and he's totally right about that.
So, what does that mean for Democrats?
Well, if Trump does not go to jail, then they get the worst of both worlds.
They get Trump on the campaign trail being able to talk about this.
And also, they look like the tyrants that they are.
If they throw him in jail, there is the real possibility of actual violence.
Seriously, if he's in jail at the time of this election, and then he loses, how many Americans are going to feel truly dispossessed by the entire system?
A huge number of Americans.
I'm not talking about like full-scale civil war, but the idea there won't be chaos and unrest is insane.
And by the way, that chaos and unrest would then be used by a President Biden in order to crack down on his political opponents even harder.
This is all getting very ugly, very, very quickly.
This is why there was a, a basic agreement.
You don't prosecute your political opponents in the United States.
But, unclear what the prosecutors are going for here.
Bragg is certainly going to ask for jail time.
Here's a reporter asking Alvin Bragg if he'll seek jail time yesterday.
Do you plan to request a prison sentence for Donald Trump's multiple violations of the gag order that was in place?
The judge scheduled a sentencing for July 11th.
We will speak in court in that time.
He also set a motion schedule.
We will speak in our court filings as we've done throughout this proceeding.
Okay, well, I don't believe that you're just making those considerations.
Here is the story about whether Trump will go to jail or not.
So, typically, you have to have exacerbating circumstances to send a quote-unquote first-time felon on B.S.
charges to jail.
A 77-year-old first-time criminal offender in the white-collar area, supposedly, you're going to send that guy to jail.
But there are a couple of things that Bragg and the judge could theoretically use in order to push Trump into jail.
Thing number one could be the violation of the gag order, which is insane.
So an unconstitutional gag order was put forward by Merchant in this case, saying that Trump could not comment about the prosecution, basically.
He couldn't comment about the judge or his daughter or anything like that.
And Trump supposedly violated that, and he threatened him with jail time at the time.
So you could theoretically say, well, his behavior shows that he's just going to go out there if he campaigns.
He's going to violate all those things.
He's going to violate the law some more, so I'm throwing him in jail.
That's factor number one.
Factor number two is that here's how the process works.
According to the Wall Street Journal, the judge set a sentencing hearing for July 11th, just days ahead of the Republican National Convention.
In the meantime, probation officers must complete an advisory pre-sentencing report and submit it to the judge before the hearing.
Trump will also get the chance to gather character letters from friends, family members, and colleagues to guide the judge's determination.
So they'll have an advisory pre-sentencing report in New York.
How do you think that's going to go?
One of the factors that is taken into account in determining whether an offender, supposed offender, gets probation or whether he goes to jail is remorse.
Do you think Donald Trump is going to show remorse?
Should he show remorse?
So they set up a catch-22.
Either Donald Trump throws himself on the mercy of the court and begs forgiveness for this evil crime that he's committed, which of course he didn't commit because there's no crime, or they throw him in jail.
That is the highest, again, the media are making it out that it's a small possibility he gets thrown in jail.
I'm gonna say that's 50-50.
And I'm leaning toward merchants gonna go all the way and try to throw him in jail because, again, you don't put the gun on the mantelpiece in Act 1 if you're not willing to take it off the mantelpiece in Act 2.
Here's a bevy of legal analysts agreeing with me on this one.
Next big step in the process is July 11th, so it's the sentencing hearing.
I do anticipate that the district attorney will ask for some sentence of incarceration, and I do think that there's a good likelihood that the judge will impose some sentence of incarceration.
In the most serious F.B.R.
cases, a sentence of imprisonment is routinely imposed.
This is the most serious falsifying business records case in the history of the state of New York.
I think Alvin Bragg is going to ask for a sentence of incarceration, and I think Judge Mershawn will very seriously weigh that.
Okay, so, is he going to go all the way?
Even if he doesn't, he could put him under house arrest, which means he'd be restricted to Mar-a-Lago wearing an ankle bracelet while doing all of these rallies, presumably digitally.
And what happens if he goes to jail?
Well, it's possible that Trump could be sentenced to time behind bars, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Mayor Jan has broad discretion to impose an even harsher punishment than the four-year sentence that would be the max.
There are factors favoring no-prison-time, that he's a first-time offender, 77-year-old, convicted of a low-level non-violent crime.
It's also rather impractical.
Merchant can make Trump pay a fine or condition his freedom on Trump staying out of criminal trouble.
Trump can ask the judge or an appellate court for bail pending appeal to keep him out of custody while he challenges his conviction.
But again, this whole thing is designed to get the Democrats beyond the election.
That's what this is, it's a put-up job.
So why would Mershon allow him to stay out of jail pending his appeal?
And I'm going to predict that he sentences him to some jail time.
And all hell is going to break loose, because you don't go halfway if you are Judge Mershon.
If you're willing to blow the law this strongly, Then why not go all the way and become the guy who put Donald Trump in jail and be a hero of the republic to Democrats forevermore.
Alright, in a second we're going to be joined by Megyn Kelly to talk all this through.
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So I signed up 20 years ago to fight extremists, put my life on the line, and now I'm deemed one because of what I believe, because of my Christian faith, or because I work for Fox News, or because I support Donald Trump.
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Joining us online is Megyn Kelly.
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She can also be found at youtube.com slash Megyn Kelly, wherever else you get your podcasts.
Megyn, thanks for taking the time.
Really appreciate it.
My pleasure.
Good to see you.
So obviously pretty dark day for the Republic.
The actual case here was non-existent and it was kind of a turducken of a charge in the sense that it was a misdemeanor that was wrapped around a supposed felony that was wrapped around another claim.
It was almost like three separate claims and the charging documents That's something I've never seen before, which is the judge literally saying to the jury that if four of you agree on the underlying felony, and four more of you agree on a separate underlying felony, and four more of you agree on a third underlying felony, that we can aggregate that all together and say that you all agree on the underlying felony that would allow for the charging of a state misdemeanor charge as a state felony, even though we are well outside the statute of limitations.
Have you ever seen anything remotely like this?
No, I heard somebody say it's like a Russian nesting doll of crimes.
And that's exactly right.
Just keep going, keep going until you find the little one on the inside.
And the whole thing was a fraud from the beginning, Ben, because what really Alvin Bragg was trying to do was bring a federal case as a state prosecutor.
And he's not allowed to do that.
He doesn't have jurisdiction to enforce federal election law.
Which is the exclusive jurisdiction of the Feds, of the Federal Election Commission here, which did investigate this after it broke in 2018, that they'd done this whole catch-and-kill scheme with AMI and Michael Cohen, and said, this is not a problem, legally.
This is an electoral issue.
You guys can decide whether you like this or don't like this, but it doesn't break any laws.
And he decided to backdoor it.
If he had just said the underlying felony is federal election law, that's what I'm basing this whole case on, He wouldn't have had jurisdiction to bring this.
And I mean, this judge has pretended that that's not the case.
This judge has pretended all along that you don't actually have to show a violation of the underlying crime.
You just have to show an intent to violate it.
So basically what happened was the collusion happened between the DA and the judge to make this as easy for Alvin Bragg as humanly possible, letting him skirt jurisdictional rules Legal rules and pretend that there's a felony when there's not one.
No one involved in this case apparently understands federal election law, which we do because literally we've had Brad Smith on.
We've been discussing it hour after hour on our show for the better part of a year.
And it was completely misspelled out in the jury instructions.
And the judge led this jury to the fountain of guilt.
And I blame him and I blame Alvin Bragg.
And I don't really blame the jury because they had no choice given what they were given here.
Megan, obviously you had this sort of hotly fought contest with Dan Abrams last night talking about the federal election law issues and obviously I'm in agreement with you.
I'm not sure exactly what he's talking about when he suggests that what is essentially a payment for an NDA, which happens literally all the time, all the time, in a wide variety of contexts by the way, everything from employment law to payoffs like this, Or just settlements.
I mean, this is just like a normal thing that happens in the legal world all the time.
The suggestion that that is, by any stretch of the imagination, a violation of federal election law because it happened close to an election, as Bradley Smith has himself said, that would be equivalent to arguing that if I had an outstanding lawsuit against me and I wanted to settle that before the election because I just didn't want it hanging over me for the election, that that would amount to a federal campaign contribution by me, leaving aside the fact that there are no contribution limits.
By Trump himself, because the candidate can donate as much money to his own campaign as he wants, even if it were to be considered a federal election campaign donation.
That's exactly right.
So if you run for office, you cannot settle any cases against you.
Once you declare, you're just exposed.
And you must, according to this jury verdict, and now Dan Abrams, you must let the public see all of your dirty laundry.
Sorry, but if you try to cover any of it up like a normal human or businessman, Or in Trump's case back in 16, man with the number one show on television, you have to be publicly embarrassed, no matter what kind of cretin crawls out of the walls to try to disparage you.
That's absurd.
And Brad Smith has been pointing out all along, he was federal election chair under Clinton.
He was appointed by Bill Clinton as the chairman of the FEC.
And he has been pointing out all along what you look at to determine whether this is a campaign contribution or could be categorized as one.
Which is what they assumed in this case, is whether you look at the nature of the payment, not the subjective belief of the defendant.
It doesn't matter whether Trump did this to advance his campaign, whether that was the goal of Cohen, Pecker, and Trump.
All that matters is the nature of a hush money payment.
Is it the kind of thing that could only ever be used to advance a campaign?
Or might it have a more broad purpose and is used outside of the electoral context?
The answer is clearly the latter.
The things that fall within the former lane are things like rally fees and get-out-the-vote efforts, polling to see how a candidate is doing.
Those, yes, would be legitimate campaign finance items that you could get in trouble for if they exceeded the limits.
But that's not this case.
Hush money payments.
Alexander Hamilton got in trouble for a hush money payment.
So they've been happening since the beginning of time.
Only in this case are we pretending.
It's somehow unlawful.
So Megan, the other issue where you're seeing a lot of people complain about the right wing take on this particular case or even the independent claim on this particular case is Donald Trump goes out there and he says, and I've said, and I think you've said as well, that in the absence of Biden being in the White House, it is unlikely that this happens.
That the reality is that the Democratic Party has decided that they are going to litigate Donald Trump's candidacy to death.
And what happened here is pretty obviously a put up job that involved the Biden White House.
They say, well, show us the evidence.
I mean, there is some evidence to that effect in the sense that a Manhattan prosecutor who is one of the people heading up this particular case was literally a political consultant for the DNC.
In 2018 and was working at the DOJ until five seconds ago, and then he joined this particular office about three months before the charging documents were brought down.
But again, the reality is that if Joe Biden had put out the message, hey guys, we're running an election here.
We don't want to see this sort of thing happen.
Is there any chance that Alvin Bragg would have brought this case?
Well, I guess there's some chance because he wanted to get elected himself.
I mean, he he had dual purpose of dual purpose in pursuing this.
He wanted to get elected as D.A.
and he wanted to make sure Trump didn't get elected as president.
But I don't believe that there was no coordination with the White House because look what we saw in the Fannie Willis case when she was publicly disgraced with her extramarital affair with Nathan Wade while she was actually prosecuting the case against Trump.
We saw that they coordinated with the White House.
We saw it in his bills.
They've been coordinating with the White House.
We know from Politico's reporting that Merrick Garland has been feeling the full force of the White House in the Jack Smith cases.
That Biden himself has been expressing displeasure at how long it took him, Jack Smith, to bring those two federal prosecutions.
And has been tapping the watch, tick tock, right?
Because he knows if Trump wins, those two cases go away.
So what are the odds that there's been coordination and interaction on those three, but not the fourth with Alvin Bragg in New York?
But even if there wasn't exact coordination, I don't care.
He didn't need exact coordination.
And the DA of Manhattan has an obligation, irrespective of his political motivations, not to pursue political prosecutions.
He has an obligation to pursue justice, that's it, not even convictions, just To pursue justice.
And instead of doing that, he campaigned on a promise to get Trump.
And the biggest thing, the best thing you can say about Alvin Bragg today is that he lived up to his campaign promise.
Boy, did he ever.
So, Megan, looking at what happens next, the July 11th date, which is four days before the Republican convention, which is when the sentencing hearing is supposed to actually happen, what do you think are the odds that the judge, in this case Maruchan, who obviously wanted Trump convicted, what do you think are the odds that he actually sentences him to jail time?
Because the conventional wisdom right now is, no, no way, he'll probably give him probation, or he'll give him some sort of house arrest, or something like that.
I don't know, I feel like if you go this far to get this conviction, I feel like he's gonna go all the way.
That's a dark thought.
I mean, that's seriously dark.
I don't think he's gonna give him jail time.
It would be such an egregious deviation from what would normally be done in a case like this, that I don't think he thinks he can get away with that.
It's just, I mean, a first time felon.
It's ridiculous to even say that word about Trump, but okay, let's go with it.
First time felon with no prior record.
And what would be the aggravating circumstances?
What the left is pointing to is, well, he violated the gag order.
The gag order is unconstitutional.
The gag order will not be upheld when that gets appealed.
That cannot be the basis for increasing Trump's sentencing on this unconstitutional substantive crime.
Everything around this, he wasn't afforded due process at a federal level under our federal constitution, nor under the New York state constitution, which doesn't allow you to just say, We incorporate by reference all criminal laws.
And if what he did was to cover up some vague violation of one of those, he's guilty of a felony.
So there's been multiple constitutional violations here, including that gag order, that cannot possibly be the basis of a sentence enhancement.
And I just don't think Judge Machon is gonna have the stones to go quite that far.
But He has disappointed me and surprised me many times along the way, so I guess I'm open-minded to that extreme possibility.
Yeah, I mean, here's my bet.
My bet is that what he's actually going to use as the excuse is Donald Trump's lack of remorse.
Because this is the catch 22 that they've now set up, right?
Is that he's going to go in for his probation interview.
And of course, the minute he shows remorse for a crime that he didn't commit, that becomes the issue of the campaign.
He admits that he did the crime.
He's showing remorse for doing the crime.
So he can't do that, nor would he, because we have all seen Trump.
He shows that that is the thing he is least likely to do of all human things, is to show remorse for anything he has ever done.
Yes, it's absurd.
going to happen. I could see Mershawn dragging him into court and basically saying you showed no
remorse for this crime, you've shown no remorse this whole time and so now I'm going to give you
a jail sentence. My basis for saying that is Judge Arthur Engeron who hit Trump with a 500
million dollar judgment on the basis of absolute crap, meaning that if you're a New York judge and
you want to be famous for the rest of your life, be the guy who put Donald Trump in jail.
Yes, it's absurd. It's like you're not allowed to maintain your innocence or in the context of
Engeron, your non-liable nature in the face of a ridiculous trumped up charge.
It's like, well, we found a jury that we pushed into this guilty verdict, we the judge and the prosecutor.
And now that they've done what we've told them to do, you have to say we were right all along.
You are not entitled to maintain the position that this was an erroneous verdict and that you are not guilty of this crime.
And what's amazing is, even though Trump made a strategic mistake by disputing some of the items in this case that he didn't need to dispute, he should have said, let's put to the side whether I had an interlude with Stormy Daniels.
It's irrelevant.
I think he could have gotten a stipulation.
Mr. Trump denies that he had an interlude with Stormy Daniels, but for the purposes of this trial, we are going to proceed as though he did, okay?
As though he did.
And then we wouldn't have had to have Stormy Daniels on the stand.
And he also shouldn't have contested anything about reimbursing Michael Cohen for the NDA.
There was nothing wrong with anything Trump did.
He didn't do one thing wrong.
He shouldn't have led the jury to think, this is an issue.
We've got him.
Because there was a lot of evidence that he did reimburse him.
He had tweeted that out himself.
So it's kind of leading them to believe he might have done.
Anyway, he shouldn't have done any of that.
He should have owned all of this.
But now they've put him in a position where if he denies any of it, they get to continue punishing him.
For what?
Because he said from the beginning, all of this is made up and I didn't violate the law.
So I don't know.
I maintain this judge is not going to have the stones to actually go that far.
But Ben, can we talk about what probation looks like for Donald Trump?
Because that's absolutely outrageous.
We could have the sitting president of the United States having to sit and check in with his probation officer.
He's not supposed to be associating with known felons once he's a convicted felon.
So what, like Navarro?
He's out.
He can't talk to Trump anymore.
Steve Bannon can't talk to Trump anymore.
He's got to answer to some Community college, city college guy who's trying to enforce the laws against the sitting president of the United States, who's gonna tsk-tsk him and slap his knuckles.
Travel could be restricted.
They're actually talking about Trump possibly doing rallies from his home, a home arrest, if that's what this judge sentences him to.
Part of me wants to see it, I'm gonna be honest, like the home arrest or the actual jail time.
Part of me wants to see it because it'll guarantee his win.
Every single Republican in America, every single one, the voting participation will break records on the GOP side, maybe even enough to overcome the doubtful independence.
But honestly, it can't happen.
It's too big a violation of our norms.
I mean, I totally agree with you.
Obviously, I've never seen Republicans united like this since maybe the Brett Kavanaugh trial.
And this is even higher levels than that.
So if you're a hesitant Republican or somebody who's sort of on the fence, don't really like Trump, people are going to walk over broken glass to vote for him now because this is so obviously trumped up.
It's so obviously ridiculous.
They made a massive strategic error by going after him on these charges and the dates of the calendar, this coming out first.
What a huge blunder.
It is going to benefit Trump.
I really believe that going forward.
Megan, thanks so much for the time.
Thanks for your analysis.
Thanks for having me.
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