All Episodes
Previous Next
Plain Text
May 9, 2024 - The Megyn Kelly Show
01:08:03
20240509_stormy-daniels-inconsistencies-and-judge-losing-co
|

Time Text
Deep Dive Into Law Fair 00:09:18
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show, live on SiriusXM Channel 111 every weekday at Noon East.
Hey, everyone, I'm Megan Kelly.
Welcome to the Megan Kelly Show.
We are taking a deep dive today into the news breaking on several fronts regarding the law fair against former President Donald Trump.
You know, we've been saying all along he needs to draw an inside straight in order to defeat this law affair against him.
He's doing it.
Every day brings more good news for the former president.
He's doing it.
Today, a couple of things.
Georgia's State Court of Appeals just announced that it will consider an appeal from Mr. Trump challenging the decision made by Judge Scott McAfee overseeing the case to disqualify DA Fannie Willis.
You remember that she was not disqualified.
Well, that's going up now in appeal.
The appellate court did not have to take it.
They're taking it.
And so they're going to review Scott McAfee's decision on whether she should have been DQ'd.
Huge, huge news.
Late Tuesday, Judge Aileen Cannon, she's the one down in Florida, indefinitely postponed the trial date regarding the classified documents case down there.
And then Thursday morning, Stormy Daniels is expected back on the stand in Manhattan.
Her testimony on Tuesday made headlines across the nation.
And if you ask me, it did not go well for Stormy Daniels.
You may hear something different if you listen to MSNBC, but Trump's actually doing well in that case on a number of fronts, though I still think he's going to lose it.
The mainstream media, however, this is like, this is the most exciting thing that's happened to them in years.
Silk pajamas.
Oh, he was dressed like Hugh Hefner.
STDs, they had a chat about them.
Missionary position, tell us more.
I'm telling you, this show called it when we did our fake porn reenactment show, reading the media's write-ups about just him sitting there during void of the potential jurors.
Now they're at actual sex and the media's beside itself.
What they seem to miss, given all of their focus on the pre-orient details, was the revisionist history told by Stormy Daniels on the stand.
Listen, we've kept the receipts.
When Stormy was on the view this past March, we reported on her change of tune regarding the encounter that she had with Donald Trump.
Back in 2018, she told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes that what happened that night, she specifically said, was not a Me Too situation.
Then to the View, just a month ago, she said she realized after seeing the movie Bombshell, which was about the sexual harassment scandal at Fox News, there was indeed, now she believes, a power imbalance between Stormy and Donald Trump.
Watch.
They're trying to.
Like, oh, you know, Stormy Daniels comes out, hashtag me too.
This is not a Me Too.
I did remember a little more of the words that he said to me because originally I didn't know that they were that important because they weren't direct threats.
It was more like, I thought you wanted to be a, you know, I thought you wanted to be successful.
You have to show me what it takes.
It was that kind of thing.
And I didn't really realize the gravity of that until I watched the movie Hermes Say the Lord again, bombshell.
That kind of thing.
That kind of language is a qualifier, which means he may have said nothing of the sort, that kind of thing.
He said, you know, this thing about power.
Okay, that didn't happen.
I'm just going to say, didn't happen.
That's a new fact she's offered just now in anticipation of her testimony and while they're doing a documentary about her.
But don't take my word for it.
Here's a closer look at what she said on the stand this week versus what she has said in the past.
Keep in mind, she testified yesterday, on Tuesday, to how much she now hates Donald Trump and how much she would like to see him incarcerated.
Speaking about the night she says they had sex in 2006, Stormy Daniels testified that she blacked out, clearly implying to the jury that this was a traumatic event, so traumatic she blacked out despite not consuming any drugs or alcohol.
Here's what she said on the stand per the Washington Post in the courtroom.
She had gone to the bathroom to freshen up.
This is before they had any interlude.
When she emerged from the bathroom, she was surprised to find Trump wearing a t-shirt and boxers and sitting on the bed.
She testified to the following: That's when I had that moment when I felt like the room spun in full motion and I felt the blood leave my hands and my feet, almost like if you stand up too fast.
She said, Trump, quote, stood up between me and the door, not in a threatening manner.
I think I blacked out.
Next thing I know, I was on the bed.
I was staring at the ceiling.
I don't know how I got there.
She talked about the sex that they had.
She described the position in which it happened.
And we'll get to the differences there too.
After the sex act, she testified, quote, My hands were shaking so hard.
I was having a hard time getting dressed.
All right, so that's her on the stand this week.
It was obviously traumatic, so traumatic she blacked out.
He had blocked her way when she exited the bathroom from leaving, though not in a threatening manner.
And she was so shaken up that she actually was physically shaking and could barely get dressed, was having a hard time getting dressed.
That's her testimony before this jury.
In 2011, Stormy Daniels gave an interview to In Touch magazine.
It wasn't printed until 2018 because Michael Cohen was called for comment on that magazine article in 11, and he threatened to sue In Touch.
Boy, oh boy, have times changed.
In 18, they finally ran with it.
Here is what she told the outlet at that point.
Again, this is from an interview they did in 11 with her regarding the encounter with Trump: Quote, We started kissing.
I actually don't even know why I did it, but I do remember while we were having sex, I was like, please don't try to pay me.
And then I remember thinking, but I bet if he did, it would be a lot.
Okay, so far from being blacked out, she was well aware of what was happening and she was thinking about money.
Stormy went on, you know, it was one position.
What you would expect someone his age to do.
It wasn't bad.
Don't get me wrong.
Okay, so it wasn't bad.
She went on in that old interview to say, I was more like fascinated.
I was definitely stimulated.
We had a really good banter, good conversation for a couple of hours.
I could tell he was nice, intelligent in conversation.
That's her description then.
All right, he's fascinating.
She was stimulated by him and it wasn't bad.
The sex itself wasn't bad.
Don't get me wrong.
Back to blacked out, was shaking.
The blood rushed out of my extremities.
Oh my God.
Come on.
Usually I'm guessing like if you black out during a sex act, you don't remember how good or bad it was.
But let's move on.
The reporter for In Touch also asked, Did you think the conversation would have led to what happened?
In other words, did you think that you were going to have sex?
Stormy, yeah.
Okay, so she wasn't really surprised as she testified on the stand.
She wasn't surprised at all.
She knew when having the conversation this was leading to sex.
She was not shocked, as she now claims when she exited the bathroom to find him ready for it.
This is all revisionist history.
The In Touch reporter also asked, were you attracted to him?
She responded, would you be?
And here's she said, I was more like fascinated.
I was definitely stimulated.
We had a really good banter.
Oh, what do you mean?
She was stimulated and had good banter and found him fascinating and interesting and a nice guy, not somebody who behaved in some way that caused her to black out and lose the blood in her extremities.
In the full In Touch interview, Stormy never talks about not remembering details, being shaky, shaky hands, or having trouble getting dressed.
In 2018, when speaking to 60 Minutes, Anderson Cooper, she did not use any of those words either.
Instead, she laughed at times.
Watch.
So I excused myself and I went to the restroom.
You know, I was in there for a little bit and came out and he was sitting on the edge of the bed when I walked out.
Perched.
And when you saw that, what went through your mind?
I realized exactly what I'd gotten myself into.
And I was like, here we go.
And I just felt like maybe it was sort of, I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone.
And I just heard the voice and I had, well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen.
Hush Money And Consent Claims 00:13:54
So you deserve this.
And you had sex with him?
Yes.
Unbelievable.
And still at that time, not a Me Too situation, not suggesting that in any way.
Here with me now to discuss all the latest news.
Phil Holloway, legal analyst and host of Inside the Law on YouTube, and Julian Epstein, a longtime Democratic lawyer and consultant who served as chief counsel to Democrats during Bill Clinton's impeachment trial.
Guys, welcome back to the show.
My gosh, there's a lot to discuss.
Phil, your take on what we just went through, the difference in her testimony then and now.
You know, Megan, great to be here.
As always, look, we always knew that Stormy Daniels was going to have credibility problems because just like other witnesses in the case, I'm looking at Michael Cohen, for example, she can't remember what she said from one day to the next.
And anytime you get a witness that gets in the witness stand and you can show that they've made dozens of prior inconsistent statements, and we're talking about wildly inconsistent, it goes to their credibility.
At least it would, Megan, in a typical criminal case.
Here, when you're in Manhattan with this Manhattan jury that's preconditioned, I think, to sort of believe anything that Alvin Bragg may be selling, but typically it would be a fatal blow to the prosecution.
In New York, it remains to be seen.
It's amazing when you hear the details, Julian.
This is the New York Times repeating what she said on the stand.
She's describing a remarkably intense encounter.
She says the room spun in slow motion and the blood left her hands and feet.
Says she blacked out.
Okay, so now she's traumatized, shaking, bewildered.
It's a distinction in the balance of power versus what she's been saying a lot, laughing.
It was pretty good.
It was not bad.
What you'd expect of a man that age?
I mean, it's night and day, which the jury's going to know because that 2011 In Touch magazine was the subject of the cross-examination.
Well, yeah.
And I think, well, first of all, good afternoon, Megan.
And it's great to be with you again.
I think the rift that you went through at the opening of the show is exactly what the defense attorneys are going to use in cross-examination of her.
And, you know, I would hate to be, you know, on her side when that occurs, because I think it's going to be a pretty tough cross-examination.
And I think the prosecutors will end up regretting even calling her in the first place.
I think the judge has let this case get out of control.
This case has now become an official dumpster hire on just so many levels.
But what they're doing to Donald Trump right now is exactly what they tried to do to Bill Clinton.
They didn't have a strong case against Bill Clinton.
They don't have a case against Donald Trump.
So what they're trying to do is to dirty him up with all of these prurient details of the affair and all the stuff that you just sort of went through.
And I think at the end of the day, it risks turning off the jurors.
I think it will continue to look to the public that this is a political persecution.
And I think, if nothing else, this is reversible error.
I mean, the fact that the judge is letting something, testimony like this in is reversible error.
This has nothing, nothing, zero to do with what Donald Trump is being charged with, which is misrepresenting records and furtherance of a federal campaign violation.
It's completely irrelevant to that.
To our last conversation, you talked about Brad Smith being disqualified from testifying at the trial when Brad Smith could have given very important testimony about him being the chief law enforcement officer at one point on federal campaign finance laws, saying that hush money is not a reportable expenditure.
And Donald Trump probably relied on that kind of analysis.
So how can you show he was intending to violate the law if he, in fact, was relying on expert analysis saying that hush money is not reportable?
Well, they won't let that in the case, but they'll let something completely irrelevant like this, intended just to dirty him up as much as they can in order to poison the jury pool.
And this is reversible error.
They're trying, Phil, to humiliate him.
And this judge is aiding and abetting the effort.
The defense went up there before she took the stand to try to say she is irrelevant.
Her testimony is irrelevant.
And certainly any descriptions of the alleged interlude are irrelevant.
And the prosecution said, no, we need to establish it.
We have to show that sex took place.
And the judge said, okay.
So then she starts talking about how they had conversations about STDs in the porn industry.
She actually testified and was allowed to that he didn't wear a condom.
Okay, so the jury's now heard that he's having an extramarital affair with a porn star without wearing a condom.
How is that, again, relevant to the core issue of campaign finance violations or falsifying business records?
And she goes on and on about the details of the mission.
Why do we know it was missionary, right?
Like all this stuff she got in without much of a fight, right?
The defense stood up here or there, but not that much because they've just been overruled at the beginning of her testimony.
And you and I both know you don't want to look like it's hurting me, it's hurting me.
You know, when you've already been ruled against privately by the judge, you know, all this stuff is coming in.
You don't stand on every question because then you're just telegraphing to the jury, this shit is really hurting me.
So they pick their places to object.
Then they have a sidebar and the judge is like, this is not appropriate testimony.
I expected more objections from the defense.
He's blaming them for the situation he created.
He's putting them between a rock and a hard place because if you, you know, if you don't object, you know, you can waive the error for appeal.
You can be deemed to have not objected timely.
They should have asked for like a continuing objection, something like that.
Hopefully everything that was said at sidebar was taken down and there's no waiver issues.
But apparently, Judge Murchon is he's not been reading his slip opinions because I think he failed to read that the appeals court in New York has reversed one of his colleagues for allowing prosecutors to put in too much irrelevant stuff and to slime Harvey Weinstein to the point that it created an unfair trial.
And of course, that case was recently reversed.
Judge Murchond would do well to take a lesson from that.
This testimony is, I mean, we've said it's irrelevant.
And I don't know any other way to say it other than it's now cumulative.
It's the kind of evidence that even if it were relevant to one of the issues, it's so unfairly prejudicial to the defense that it becomes otherwise inadmissible.
Now, the only thing I think that you can say about this testimony that might help Donald Trump, one of the points that he is making, and I think he's doing a good job making it through his counsel, is that any payments, and by the way, I'm not going to call them hush money because that implies there's something sinister, but the media will call it a hush money payment.
His purpose in doing that is not for benefiting his campaign.
Now we see that he could have other non-related purposes like to avoid embarrassment and also for the sake of his spouse and any number in his business enterprises, things that are unrelated to the campaign.
So this, I think, helps him make that argument that even if there was anything wrong with it, it wasn't for the purpose of benefiting the campaign.
And that is the so-called other crime that the prosecution brought out testimony from Stormy that Trump did not say don't tell anyone at any point or after it happened, immediately after it happened.
And they wanted to bring that out to suggest Trump didn't want to shut her up until he ran for office.
Well, there's also, they have to bring that out because she's now intimating through her testimony, I think, that perhaps somehow this was something less than fully consensual.
I think that's the sinister motive behind Alvin Bragg's testimony.
I think he knew good and well what she was going to say about possibly blacking out and all that sort of thing, because that the message to the jury that he's a real, real sinister and evil person.
To me, that was the real purpose of this testimony.
That, I mean, it's truly shocking.
Two quick points.
Yeah, go ahead, Julian.
Yeah.
So again, you know, to I take Phil's point on the NDA hush money semantic issue, but you said that the prosecutors said they needed to establish that sex occurred.
That's just wrong as a matter of law.
Whether or not sex occurred, there was an NDA.
And the only issue before the court is whether the NDA was misreported on the business records.
And I'm not sure, by the way, calling an NDA a legal expense is a misreporting.
I'm not either.
There's no clear guidance in New York on that.
So that's one point.
So whether they had sex is completely irrelevant.
The only question is whether there was an NDA that was misreported on business records and whether there was a federal crime that that misreporting was furthering.
And whether you want to subjectively say one of the purposes to Phil's point was not reporting on federal campaign records.
If you read the rules, the FEC rules, it's clear that an NDA is not considered a portable candidate.
We talked about that in the front.
What matters is the nature of the expenditure, not the subjective motivation in the pay owner's mind.
Even if it was, correct, but even if it was, it wouldn't have been reportable till 2017 when he was already in.
He didn't appeared in the 2016 election when he was already in office.
And even if it was, Bragg doesn't have jurisdiction to enforce that.
So this case has become a joke.
I mean, this is embarrassing.
This is exactly what the left argued during the Bill Clinton.
Well, by the way, let me before, I mean, we know, we know that the sweeping condemnations are interesting, but I want to stay to the specifics because we've got a lot of them to get through today.
And I want, that brings me to Stormy's claim.
This is another area in which they tried to ding her up on cross.
She claimed that she was threatened.
So the prosecution is trying to say, you came forward and or you did not come forward, right?
You did not come forward to say anything about this until you decided to shake down Donald Trump.
That's what you wanted to do, shake him down.
And she's like, no, the reason I didn't come forward earlier is because I was threatened.
I was in a parking lot years ago, like after it happened, closer in time to when it happened.
And a man came up to me in a parking lot when I was in Las Vegas with my daughter.
And she he threatened me that if I told people, I was going to be in some sort of trouble.
And she says that she didn't report it because it would have been upsetting to the person she was in a relationship with at the time.
Now, the New York Times reports that this is an account.
This is an account she never told some of the people who worked closely with her on the NDA.
And she first revealed it in that 60 Minutes interview in 2018.
All right.
So now in 2018, she first, for the first time, says, the reason I haven't come forward until now, 12 years after the act by that point, was because somebody threatened me.
And the prosecution got all over her.
Actually, wait, we have a soundbite of what she told Anderson Cooper in 2018 about what she did right after this alleged scary parking lot threat.
And a guy walked up on me and said to me, leave Trump alone, forget the story.
And then he leaned around and looked at my daughter and said, a beautiful little girl.
It'd be a shame if something happened to her mom.
And then he was gone.
I was rattled.
I remember going into the workout class and my hands were shaking so much, I was afraid I was going to drop her.
Did you go to the police?
No.
Why?
Because I was scared.
Okay.
So back then she says, I'm rattled.
And the prosecution gets up to her, gets up in her grill and says, in your book, you write that you went to an exercise class after this alleged threat.
So you went to an exercise class and the defense is trying to suggest she made up the whole thing to explain why she didn't come forward earlier.
The question by the defense counsel was, you were using it as an excuse to lie.
You used this supposed threat as an excuse for why you did not talk publicly.
She said, the man who allegedly threatened you doesn't exist, does he?
I thought that was actually quite effective because who goes into an exercise class right after they've been threatened?
Their life has been threatened if they reveal that they've had sex with Donald Trump.
Yeah, if you're asking me, I don't think anybody does.
Chipping Away At Credibility 00:07:11
This is the kind of thing that it just defies common sense.
It defies belief.
It's the kind of thing that there's no way that it's ever going to be able to be conclusively proven one way or the other.
And it's the kind of thing if you like Donald Trump or you're, you know, or at least not opposed to the man, you might tend to say, well, she's lying.
But on the other hand, if you just can't see past your visceral hatred for the defendant, you absolutely believe that that is the gospel truth.
And it's the, so it's easy for the kind of thing for a witness to just come out and say, because there's no way to prove or disprove it.
We're not going to hear from anybody else that was there.
We're not going to see any security camera videos from wherever it was.
There's no police reports.
There's no investigation.
It's easy to fabricate and difficult to disprove.
It's the kind of thing that all the defense lawyer can do is ask the question the way that he asked it and leave it there because there's no way to prove it through any kind of intrinsic facts otherwise.
So they're just trying to chip away at her credibility, ding her up, and ding her up.
And Julian, they did that by getting her in part to admit she hates Donald Trump.
She would love to see him incarcerated.
And also she admitted on the stand that even though she's been ordered by a federal judge to pay his attorney's costs in connection with the defamation suit she brought against him and lost, she won't pay it at some, I think $500,000.
And she said on cross, I'm not going to pay it.
I don't care.
She admitted that she had previously said she'll never pay it and she doesn't care about the court order.
So this jury is hearing she'll defy a court order to pay what she owes when it comes to Donald Trump.
She's dying to see him incarcerated and she hates him.
And they have more than enough basis to disregard every word she has said for that reason alone, never mind the many inconsistencies we just went through, many of which they heard about.
Well, this is why I think the prosecution may regret calling her.
I think the defense is going to make mince meat outer on cross-examination.
As Phil said, as for this 2011 incident, it's completely impossible to prove it was true.
And no one has tried to attach Donald Trump to it, even if it were true.
If you were to attract Donald Trump, it would prove he wanted to keep the affair quiet long before he ran for president.
But just let me just add to that for one second, Julian.
Even on that front, Michael Cohen, who's now turned in favor of the prosecution and against Donald Trump, even he has never to this day alleged that somebody in Trump's orbit or Trump himself or he as the conciliarity Trump dispatched somebody to go threaten Stormy Daniels.
It's a lie.
She told the lie to justify why she didn't come forward all that time.
And the prosecute or the defense attorneys were onto it.
Go ahead.
But there's a bigger point, too.
All of this stuff we are talking about is completely irrelevant.
It has nothing to do with whether or not the records were falsified, as we just mentioned.
It's not clear that they were.
And it has nothing to do with whether they were falsified in furtherance of some federal crime, which wasn't a crime.
So what has happened is the judge here has completely lost control of this trial and is now trying to has become, and remember, this judge made political contributions to Biden in 2020.
His daughter is a political activist.
I wouldn't normally say these kinds of things, but I think the conflicts are so rife here.
Both prosecutors, Colangelo and Bragg, made political contributions to Democrats, including Biden.
This case now has become so out of control that rather than dealing with a central question here, the judge is playing party to this death by a thousand cuts on completely irrelevant issues aimed at going after reputational matters that have nothing to do with the core of the case here.
This is a joke.
And Democrats and civil libertarians should be saying this case is a joke.
And this is exactly the kind of thing that Republicans will do to Democrats when they get into office.
And this is why, and it'll be no one's fault but the Democrats for not having objected to it when the shoe was on the other foot.
Here is Judge Shira Sheinlin, no relation to Judge Judy.
She was appointed to the federal bench by Bill Clinton saying much the same.
Listen to her analysis.
I think this is from a CNN clip, SAT 10.
The material that came in was not relevant to this criminal case at all.
And I think it shows that she was trying to get Trump.
I actually thought there was a motive there.
She said she hates him.
She said she'd like to see him in prison.
I think she was purposely throwing out this stuff to make sure the jury, jurors were prejudiced, particularly the women jurors, but probably half of the men too, were really put off.
That's the big question, Phil.
Did she succeed?
Because she was, the judge pointed out, a difficult witness.
The reporting of many journalists who were in the courtroom was that she was squeezing these things in.
She would speak fast on direct and would slip in new information about Donald Trump, like the no condom and things like that, before the defense could even get on its feet to object and was trying to joke with the jury.
Journalists were reporting most of them didn't land.
The jurors did not smile or laugh in response to her attempts at humor.
So it sounded to me like she was not a very effective witness.
However, she managed to get those things in and they have a way of lingering.
Well, this is also New York.
And if the jurors are predisposed to hate Donald Trump as well, I mean, the man won only, I think, 12% of the vote there the last election.
And that was before everybody fled New York to go to free states like Florida and elsewhere.
So who knows what the demographics are now?
But if the majority of the people on that jury are predisposed to hate Donald Trump, then everything that we are saying here about Stormy Daniels and her lack of credibility and the lack of relevance may not even matter because the deck is stacked against Donald Trump.
Normally, if this was someplace, even maybe in Fulton County, Georgia, of all places, a jury, if the jury hears this kind of testimony, maybe they ignore the witness.
Maybe they even tend to side with the defense because the prosecution is bringing an irrelevant witness and wasting their time.
But if the deck is stacked against him in New York, in Manhattan, then I just can't help but be concerned that despite the legal flaws with this testimony and despite the fact that the judge should have granted a mistrial and despite the fact that it's cumulative and irrelevant, all these things don't matter.
I'm concerned that a jury is also going to be out to get Trump, just like Stormy Daniels is out to get Trump, just like Alvin Bragg is out to get Trump.
And just like speaking of Colangelo, leaves a lofty perch at Biden's Department of Justice, takes an apparent demotion to come to Manhattan to get Trump.
Corruption In Mainstream Media 00:04:56
If everybody is in on the get Trump game plan, including the jury, then none of the points that we are making here today might matter until it perhaps a court of appeal.
And that's my real concern with that.
Yeah, and that's not going to happen until after the election.
You're not, you're not wrong about any of that, but I will say it's this woman now trying to spin this into a me too situation, both with the testimony on the stand on Tuesday and what she said to the view about the power imbalance is really galling.
Okay.
That applies in the workplace, Stormy.
You don't get to suggest you're a Me Too victim just because you had sex with a man who has more money than you.
That's not what Me Too was about.
It was about extracting sexual favors while threatening one's position of employment.
At best, what she's alleging is that Trump said, I might be able to get you on celebrity apprentice, and she's the one trying to exploit her ability to give him sex so she could get the role.
All right.
She never consented, said it wasn't consensual, that she didn't do it willingly.
And this is just a bastardization of what the Me Too movement at its core was.
It was bastardized by many people, but the core of the movement was women trying to get ahead at the office based on their merit should not have to sleep with their boss or give sexual favors to a superior at the workplace in order to get there.
That's not what happened.
It's infuriating to watch her try to glom on, Julian.
And by the way, the leftist reaction to her, nobody's pointing that out, right?
Nobody will speak up for what the core of the women's rights issue was.
They'd love to have her on board because it makes Trump look bad.
And I'll just give you a sampling.
It's not on Me Too, but here's a little bit of Maddow and Nicole Wallace talking about their observations in the wake of Stormy.
Listen.
She said today, I have no shame talking about her career choices.
And there's no reason she should.
She's got self-determination.
She has given herself the career that she wants.
But we can have shame.
We can have shame about our political choices as a country in terms of who we are elevating as America's face to the world.
And today is just, I mean, none of us will ever get this taste out of our mouth.
Wow.
Because I guess all the Democrats are pitch perfect when it comes to their sex lives in office.
Yeah, well, I think in addition to the point that you just made, certainly about the legal requirements of workplace harassment, which I think is accurate, the, you know, the role of the news media here is to be getting issues like that, the way you just stated it, be getting it accurate and to be correcting things that are false.
The fact that they don't do it along the lines of what you just said, and they are, in fact, treating this case as a serious case, I think tells you about the corruption of a lot of mainstream media today.
They are not looking at the truth.
They are not looking at getting the facts.
If you look at the number of people and news organizations that have saved the ratings, that have built their careers, that have otherwise benefited personally from going after Trump since 2016.
It's just staggering.
I mean, you know, the whole Russia Gate issue was sort of built on, I mean, it saved, you know, it may have saved the ratings for CNN and MSNBC, and it built a lot of careers over there and it built a lot of careers in newsrooms.
But it turned out to be not really factually based, right?
But, you know, when we found out that there wasn't strong evidence that Trump was a Russian mole, you didn't hear a lot of the people that spent three, four, five years building their career saying, you know, we were wrong.
I mean, you can make the same kind of analogies about the Wuhan Lab and you can make Hunter Biden.
You can go on down the line about the news media making these their careers, reporters, news people who are supposed to be honoring the profession by going after the truth.
What they've become is opinion activists.
And sort of all that matters is that they can get a viewership that gets angry, that gets upset, that can throw contempt towards the other side.
And that's how they build their careers.
And when they make that leap to opinion activism, it's when you stop thinking critically along the lines of the riff that you just made, which I think was, you know, was spot on, or looking at really, is this case being handled in a fair way?
So the media is going along with this charade because it's good for them personally.
It's good for their careers.
Well, they're more than complicit.
They are playing along with it because it's good for them personally.
They think it builds their followers, their ratings, their social media brand.
And this is a corruption of the system that more people need to be calling out.
Prosecutors As Opinion Activists 00:06:37
All right.
And not for nothing, but I completely disagree with Rachel Maddow.
Stormy Daniels should have some shame around being a porn star.
That's not something to be proud of.
And I'm not afraid to say that.
She's got self-determination.
Yes, she's self-determined to be a professional hooker.
That's what you are.
You're getting paid to have sex on camera.
That's what being a porn star is.
You take something that's supposed to be absolutely lovely and special and awesome between two loving people, ideally to procreate or be in a marriage or a relationship in which that will happen.
And you bastardize it so that random strangers can get off in their basements.
There's nothing valorous about it.
I would have shame too if I were Stormy Daniels.
Sorry, but we shouldn't be celebrating it, Rachel.
Okay, let's move on because there's a lot going on in Trump legal world.
And Phil, how about the Georgia appellate court taking up the Fannie Willis case, suggesting maybe she is going to get DQ'd from this thing after all?
Tell us the headlines here.
Yeah, so today I got a text message right when the news was breaking.
And so I immediately took to X and posted it out there.
And, you know, it's as I predicted, the Court of Appeals, because this issue of Fonnie Willis and whether she has a conflict of interest and how she has behaved, quite frankly, in an irresponsible way in bringing this case, because it's such an important issue, the trial judge took the unusual step of allowing the parties to take his order up on appeal with, you know, prior to the trial.
It's an interlocutory appeal is what we call it.
It's unusual, but it can happen.
But the Court of Appeals also has to agree to hear it, Megan.
It's discretionary.
And so they had like 45 days and the clock was ticking.
I think it was going to be Monday.
Today, they said, yes, we are going to agree to hear the appeal.
And so now we move on to the next phase.
There's going to have to be briefing by the parties and, of course, oral argument in a couple of months.
And it's going to be heard by a panel of three judges.
And it's going to take, of course, a majority of that.
So two judges on the panel of three are going to have to decide with the defense in order to disqualify Fonnie Willis.
But that's not all.
They're asking that the case be dismissed in addition to her being disqualified.
What we don't know is who we're going to get on the panel, who are the three judges.
We just don't know that right now.
But if there's two judges that at a minimum believe that she should be disqualified, the case is going to be effectively over because there's no other prosecutor in their right mind that would want it because Megan, the odor of mendacity will remain in the case, even if another prosecutor gets on it and it's irreparable.
They would have to start over from scratch.
And it's just the kind of thing that's too big of an ask for another prosecutor.
When do we find out which panel they pulled to hear this appeal?
Well, we don't know yet.
It's going to have to be assigned to a panel.
And of course, these things rotate, right?
It's not the same panel, I don't believe, that agreed to hear it.
It's going to be a second panel.
So we're going to have at this point at least six judges involved in the decision, the combined decision to take the case and then what to do with it.
So we don't yet know how it's going to be assigned, but that's going to be something obviously we're going to have to watch very closely.
Phil, does the case keep moving in the meantime while they take this up on appeal?
Does Fanny Willis get to go forward at the trial level?
Until now, I'm of the belief that it does not, because once the case goes up on appeal, and up until today, it was not officially on appeal.
Now it's officially on appeal.
And so I think maybe the argument was that some of the other business of the court, trial court could continue.
I am of the belief that now that the case is officially in the court of appeals, that the trial judges divested of jurisdiction to take any action.
And I think even if it's unwise because you don't want to do a whole lot of work preparing the case, gearing it up for trial, if it turns out the prosecutor who's representing the state at these pretrial matters is not supposed to be there.
So I think that's a practical matter.
That is just a true bombshell, Julian.
I don't know how closely you follow this, but Phil and we were on this case very from the beginning in a very detailed way.
And this is huge.
I mean, this is, we talked about the inside straight.
Georgia very well could go away.
If Fannie Willis gets disqualified, it's done.
And this one needs to go away for Trump because he can't on the two federal cases.
He can pull the prosecutor off of that, but he can't pull them off of New York and Georgia.
New York's going to be resolved before November.
Then there's Georgia lingering.
Oh, I think this case will go away.
I mean, look, I was critical of what Donald Trump did with Rossenberger in Georgia.
I don't know that it crossed the line into criminal behavior.
I have my concerns about that.
I've written about that.
The use of the racketeering laws is almost unprecedented in a circumstance like this.
And remember, Fonnie Willis herself was conflicted, just the way Bragg was conflicted and Letitia James were conflicted.
She held a fundraiser for one of the opponents of the target of the initial investigation.
So she was deeply conflicted and she's been very clear about her dislike of Donald Trump.
These conflicts with these prosecutors are a big deal.
And then when it crosses over into what she was accused of, which was basically a kickback scheme in which she hired an unqualified boyfriend, spent over half a million dollars, sent him over $100 and half a million dollars.
He was then kicking that money back to her.
She claims she paid it back, but she's got no records.
It was all in cash.
I mean, sort of all of that stuff is just hard to swallow.
So I think not only will on appeal, is there likely to be a finding of a conflict of interest, I think she's got to be careful about potential perjury charges here.
But this is another case where just it's sort of, you know, this has become, I sort of sometimes wish Tom Wolf were still alive because this is such great material for sort of a discussion about this charade that a lot of this lawfare has become.
I mean, if Donald Trump did something wrong, there should be consequences clearly.
But the way that the left has behaved, bringing these cases, waiting eight years in the case of the New York case we were just discussing, waiting four years in the case of the election interference just before the election, it's outrageous to be, this is election interference.
Accountability For Perjury Charges 00:14:42
What's happening is bringing these cases, and I'm not a Donald Trump supporter.
I voted for Hillary in 1916.
I voted for Biden in 20.
I didn't vote for Donald Trump at all.
But waiting to bring these cases until the eve of election is abuse of authority.
And at some point, there needs to be a reckoning here because this is exactly the kind of thing that Republicans are going to do to Democrats when they get into power.
And Democrats will have no one to blame but themselves for not speaking up and for countenancing the abuse of the legal system, the way it's being abused in these cases.
So, so true.
Phil, I've been dying to ask you about Nathan Wade's interview on ABC.
We ran this soundbite the other day on the show, but your reaction, I'd really love.
Can we run SAT 18?
So you didn't realize when you took the case, your life was really going to be under a microscope.
I did not realize that my life would be in danger.
The microscope, I don't have a problem with.
The truth is, you know, if the worst that you could find was the fact that I had a relationship with someone or that I happened to be going through a divorce.
That's okay.
That's okay.
I have nothing to hide.
That's the worst that you could find.
That's how he styles what happened to him, Phil.
That's, you know, that they found out I was in a relationship and got a divorce.
Well, look, when you're in a hole, the first thing you have to do is stop digging.
And I wonder if the judges on the Court of Appeals were watching this news this week because that was just a couple of days ago, right?
And just today, we get the news that, of course, the disqualification issue is going to be before the Court of Appeals.
His testimony, as I recall it, his and hers, by the way, from the disqualification hearing, was that they were no longer a romantic item before the Trump indictment, which I think was the first week of August of 2023.
In that interview, he said that they ended their relationship towards the end of 2023.
Well, which one was it?
Okay.
Were you telling the truth on ABC or were you telling the truth under oath in court?
Or maybe neither one.
We just don't know because you can't square what he's saying to ABC with what was said in court.
So it's just another example.
And Phil, we know he perjured himself.
We know he perjured.
I'm, Nathan Wade, you can come sue me.
You lied under oath in your divorce proceedings.
Sue me if I'm not saying the right thing.
Go ahead, bring it.
Sue me if that's not true.
You lied.
You lied under oath in your divorce proceedings.
And I believe you lied in your proceeding with Fannie Willis.
But now he's trying to forget, like, oh, I just had a divorce, Phil.
That's the worst they could find on me.
Well, that's not the worst they can find.
One of the worst they found on him was that he was arguably giving kickbacks after this no-bid contract that his girlfriend gave him to prosecute a case that he had no business being on.
That's the worst thing.
But on top of all of that, and it's not the fact that they were sleeping together that I or anybody really, I think, has a problem with.
It's the fact of the money.
It's the fact of the not telling the truth to the court.
It's the fact of filing what I believe, in my opinion, to be a false document and affidavit in the court and what I believe to be false testimony in court.
That is turning the justice system on its ear.
It's making a mockery of the judicial system.
All of these lawfare cases make a mockery of it.
And it's embarrassing.
It's embarrassing to me as a member of the legal profession.
This is not what the court system is supposed to be about.
This is not how lawyers are supposed to behave.
And it's the kind of thing that makes me just feel, it makes me feel disgusting.
I mean, it's just ugly.
And it's the kind of she didn't ask him any of that.
No follow-ups by that ABC reporter.
She failed.
I've got to spend one more question on this, and then we'll move on to the other case.
There, Sadow, Steve Sadow, who represents or SATO Trump in the Georgia case, is upset because his big thing in trying to get Fanny disqualified was she made those statements in that church suggesting that the defendants were racists and that they only went after Nathan Wade because he was black, as opposed to the fact that he was the one shtipping Fannie Willis and doing the kickback scheme.
And the judge said, I'm not going to disqualify based on that.
I don't like it.
I don't like what she said.
And you better not do it again, but I'm not going to disqualify.
Well, the other day, Fannie Willis goes out back in public, and I'm going to show the sound bite.
And you're going to hear this pastor taking aim at Trump.
You can't see her in the shot, but it is the case that Fannie Willis was right in front of him.
This was her event.
They were together.
And here's what this guy said: the Reverend Motley.
It occurred to me after watching him just for a short while, Bishop, that all of the, and this is what came to my mind: all of the resources of hell, all right, has been made available to this man.
Somebody said on yesterday that I believe it was Reverend Al Sharpton or someone on his show that there's not a redeeming quality in the man.
All right.
All right.
He is soaked and saturated with evil.
Wow.
Here's the picture.
We'll show it of her sitting right with him.
So, look, there she is.
She's right there looking up at him like he's her apostle.
Phil, could this get her in trouble?
Yeah, it really should get her in trouble.
She may not have uttered the words herself, but she stood up right after that and gave prepared remarks.
And, you know, what she should have done, Megan, is she should have said, wait a minute, Pastor, I can't be out here publicly talking in a campaign setting about a case that I'm actively prosecuting.
It's not right.
It's not proper.
And she should have told him that ahead of time, but she's not interested in doing the right thing.
She's only interested in elevating herself politically.
So she's willing to flout the rules.
But the right thing to do is to not go out and publicly talk about cases that you're currently prosecuting.
And you damn sure don't say or don't let others say on your behalf that a defendant in the case is evil and has no redeeming qualities.
They were just as bad to endorse her.
They were there to endorse it.
It was all about her.
It's not like some random gathering of them.
And she allowed it, Phil.
Yeah, and it's as worse.
It's worse to me than what was said almost inside the church because now she's been put on notice.
The judge threatened her in his order with maybe it's time to put a gag order on Finnie Willis because in his words, she was wading into dangerous waters.
Well, she's neck deep in it now.
She is neck deep in dangerous waters.
That is forensic misconduct.
It is unlawful.
It is wrong.
And it's the kind of thing that should have gotten her kicked off the case already.
But if that wasn't enough, this should be the straw that breaks the camel's back.
That press conference was absolutely egregious and it was wrong.
And she needs to be accountable for it.
Here's Steve Sadow saying Trump, Trump argued Willis engaged in forensic misconduct.
The court said, don't do it again.
So yesterday, Willis had a religious endorser stand right behind her, say to the media, the president uses the resources of hell and is saturated with evil.
Unbelievable.
All right, last, last question.
Fanny Willis has been, she's been called, I don't know if it was a subpoena or how they reached out to her, to testify before the Georgia State Senate special committee investigating whether she misused taxpayer money during her relationship with Nathan Wade.
This is the panel that called Ashley Merchant.
And she's saying she's not going to go.
She was asked about it Monday doing the same thing with the faith leaders.
Here's what she said in SOT 14.
Well, I don't even think they have the authority to say, you know what I mean, but they need to learn the law.
God damn it.
Will you appear?
Yes or no?
I will not appear to anything that is unlawful.
And I have not broken the law in any way.
I'd said it, you know, I'll say it amongst these leaders.
I'm sorry folks get pissed off that everybody is treated evenly.
So she's thumbing her nose at them.
What do you think?
She could have, she would have thrown somebody in jail if they refused to show up for her grand jury, which, by the way, you can make a strong argument was unlawful.
That issue is also about to be before the Georgia Court of Appeals because she did not have the proper referral from the state election board that she needed to prosecute an alleged election crime.
But nevertheless, she is setting up a legal challenge to fight the Georgia State Senate, which has a lawful and duly constituted committee that's meeting.
The legislature is not even in session, but they're still having meetings because they want to be able to propose legislation next year when the legislature comes back to prevent this kind of thing from happening, to provide more oversight.
The committee the other day heard a four-hour, had a four-hour hearing.
They heard from the chairman of the county commission that basically they have no oversight whatsoever after they award her money in her budget.
They give her the money.
She says what it's going to be used for, but they can't stop her from doing it on whatever she wants.
And guess who she had in attendance as her lawyer, former governor Roy Barnes, the same one who testified in the so she's got him working now as her lawyer, apparently, setting up state senate to oppose any subpoena.
That's perfect.
Okay, let me move on, Julian, because I want to get to the Trump case with you in Florida.
So we're not shocked that the Florida case is not going to get tried before November, but I mean, this is just officially a death knell to that happening.
Judge Aileen Cannon has, quote, indefinitely postponed the trial.
This was so predictable that they got to figure out who, if anyone, the jury, the defense counsel, even Trump at this point, the defendant, can see the classified documents that are the basis for the claim against him.
And that requires all sorts of background checks and security clearances and so on of everybody involved in arguments and pretrial motions.
So she's officially canceled the May tentative date they had, saying it's postponed indefinitely.
And you think what in response to that?
Well, there's a concept known as jumping the shark, which is when you try to be too cute by half, it ends up backfiring on you.
And the people bringing these cases that waited till the last minute right before the election to bring them, you know, these things are starting to fall apart.
I actually think the New York case is falling apart, but I, and as you just mentioned, the Georgia case is falling apart.
This documents case, I think, is falling apart precisely because they waited until the eve of election to do it.
Anybody familiar with the basic facts in this case knows that when you're dealing with classified documents, you're going to have extended pretrial motions and procedures, hearings, in order to determine who gets access to what documents, in particular because many of the people that need to review in order to put on the defense don't have security clearances.
So you've got to go through the whole process for security clearances.
The court's got to decide what is going to be relevant in the case, who gets to see what.
Sometimes he's involved.
Really, really important national security issues.
So the court tries to keep a lid on it.
The point of this all, Megan, it was predictable.
So when the Justice Department waited, you know, four years to bring the election interference case on January 6th, they should have known the question of presidential immunity was going to be litigated.
The Wall Street Journal was talking about this a year ago.
They should have known that this was going to be something that would likely go to the Supreme Court.
They should have known when they brought this case that you were going to have extensive pretrial motions on exactly the issue that you just mentioned, which is the classified documents and who gets access to that and which documents are actually going to see the light of day in court.
So this is, I think, sort of lawfare imploding on its own weight.
And it, you know, I think the left at some point is going to have a reckoning on this.
Julian, what's embarrassment here?
What is Jack Smith going to do?
Is he going to drop now?
Because there's two pieces of that case.
Trump had a bunch of documents he shouldn't have had.
And then when hit with a subpoena by the feds, he ignored it, defied it, obstructed it.
And there are many arguing Jack Smith, many have said from the beginning, he never should have brought part one.
He should have just stuck to obstruction, which is a much cleaner, easier case for him.
The obstruction, okay.
So does he, do you think now in the wake of this, does he, Jack Smith, drop part one and just make this a pure obstruction case in an effort to try to put the pedal to the metal before November?
Theoretically, he could do that.
It gets hard to sort of put the toothpaste back into the tube at this point of the case.
He could theoretically try to do it.
The strongest thing he has on the documents case is the obstruction case.
But I think there are all kinds of procedural hoops that he would have to go through in order to segregate these two issues.
But, you know, again, I think that Democrats got to be careful here because, you know, you can make a court in the case of Biden documents, there wasn't any obstruction there.
Biden agreed to give the documents back.
But under the Espionage Act, there is a provision, I think it's subsection F, which says a reckless treatment, sort of gross negligence treatment of documents and you're knowing that you know that you have in your possession, even if you later give that back so there's no obstruction, give them back so there's no obstruction, is a felony.
And again, to my point about the tables being turned, I can see a case where somebody could bring a case, could bring an indictment against Joe Biden for that.
I'm not advocating that.
I hope that that doesn't happen.
But if you look at just the plain reading of the law, so I think Democrats have got to be very careful here.
I don't think actually Jack Smith is going to divide the case along lines you suggested, although theoretically he's not this is a case of probability.
Potential Hung Jury Verdict 00:11:02
I don't get it.
I don't know, Phil, how can he not divide it?
Well, because he's not going to get a trial.
I know, but he's not going to get a trial.
His only goal is to get a media.
Even if you do that, Megan, it's not clear you have time to schedule a trial on that part of it before November.
But he's got at least a shot.
I don't know.
He's got at least a shot.
You got to jump through it.
Maybe I'm wrong.
I'm sure there are hoops, but there, but there's zero chance of him getting this case to trial before November, which he's made very clear as his sole goal for all the reasons we know.
I don't see how he keeps part one alive at this point.
I just, I just don't.
But let me give you a little sampling, Phil, of how the media has decided.
Look, this has been predicted.
If you listen to Andy McCarthy, he tried these cases for a living where he had lots of classified documents involving terrorists.
He said from day one, no chance this gets tried before November 2024.
Understanding the number of security clearances and so on, you'd have to go through.
This is not a shock shock, as Julian's just said.
It's not.
You could have foreseen that this was going to take much longer.
Nonetheless, here's some of the reaction from the media.
Here's Judge, this is Lisa Rubin on the judge on Morning Joe.
And right after it, we'll play Joe Scarborough himself on Eileen Cannon, the judge in the case.
Listen.
This is a judge who is overwhelmed and is second-guessing herself at every corner.
She seems to be overwhelmed with anxiety about the import of the case.
And so a combination of insecurity in your own decisions, the gravity of the case before you, and maybe also some inclination to slow walk where you don't have trust in yourself, that's a toxic brew.
And we're, you know, we're all drinking it right now.
We're watching it play out.
I guess she's either ill-equipped, extraordinarily ill-equipped, or she just doesn't care what the world thinks of her.
She's right now looking like. everything she's doing, she's doing to help Donald Trump.
I just want to tell the listening audience, Phil, as Joe Scarborough is saying, she's just ill-equipped.
You've got Mika Brzezinski there who knows nothing about anything and certainly knows nothing about the law going.
She's got the hands out like, what can one do?
Shaking her head like, it's such a shame that this federal district judge is such a dumbass, unlike me.
The amount of delusion sitting on that set.
She knows nothing.
This coffee cup filled with water has more legal gravitas than Mika Brzezinski does.
Just know when you don't know anything and be quiet.
Anywho, what do you make of the criticisms now that the judge was overwhelmed and full of anxiety and ill-equipped or just doesn't care, Phil?
Well, I have news for MSNBC and all nine people who watch MSNBC.
The magnitude of the case before the judge alone, which one of the people I just heard speaking about, that issue alone is enough to cause a wise judge to pump the brakes and say, look, we don't need to go headlong into this thing without doing our due diligence.
The judge's job is to make sure that the trial and the process is fair.
And when you're rushing through it because you're trying to get the trial done for some reason, like, you know, before an election, that's sort of arbitrary.
It has nothing to do with justice.
The judge's job is to make sure the trial and the process is fair to the defendant.
And that's what due process requires.
And so the fact that a judge is actually providing due process and a fair process to a criminally accused is something that people on the left used to celebrate.
But now, because they are so consumed with get Trump hatred, it's the wrong thing to do in their mind.
They would rather see somebody like Fonnie Willis on the bench who is absolutely just going to do anything recklessly and carelessly with one mission in mind, and that is to get Trump before the election.
Julian, can you believe that?
And Joe Scarborough, too.
Like, okay, so she, it just has to be she's dumb or she doesn't care.
Do you think he's ever tried a case involving this number of classified documents, allegedly classified documents, intel matters, having security clearances?
This is a joke.
These people who pretend to be experts are a joke.
Well, that's right, because journalism has changed.
It is no longer about fact-finding.
They're searching for the truth.
It is about opinion and building your following based on your opinion, even if it's sort of superficial.
This was very predictable, as I just said.
I don't want to be repetitive, but when this case was brought, there were plenty of commentators, myself included, but lots of others.
Andy McCarthy is excellent, who said that, you know, when you are anytime you bring a case with classified documents, you will have extended pretrial procedures.
It was completely predictable.
So when Joe Scarborough, you know, sort of laments to the MSNBC viewers that this is some type of abuse, he's got no, he's got no solution.
He has no way, and nor does Mika have any way of saying this is what the judge should have done in this case.
There's no way around the classified information procedure.
It's the act that requires that the court go through these kinds of promotion in order to protect national security and determine what national security documents will actually be seen by witnesses, by defense counsel and others before they make their way before all of this makes its way into the courtroom.
So completely predictable.
And, you know, in terms of a new trial, it's sort of it would be a new indictment and this clock would start kicking.
As I say, it's theoretically impossible.
It's theoretically possible, but when you look at what's involved in bringing just once the indictment just on the obstruction, it's hard for me to see that getting done before November, no matter how you slice it.
Yeah, that's why Trump's drawing the inside straight.
All right.
So you had mentioned during Stormy that piece of our discussion.
You thought it was going poorly for the prosecution.
Does that lead you, Julian, even with this jury pool to believe there will be an acquittal or a hung jury?
I think there will be a hung jury.
I think when you get down to when I and I and I know I'm going out on a limb on this, I know I'm in the minority, but I think when you get down, yeah, I think that when you get down into the question about whether this was a book creeping violation, there's nowhere that I can find in New York law that says an NDA shouldn't be recorded as a legal expense.
So that's one.
And then there's a second question about whether there is a federal offense that you can attach it to.
The court has the court has no jurisdiction on that.
And as we've discussed at Nazi of now, there's no federal crime here.
Right, but we're talking about what the jury is going to do.
I think that the defense has an opportunity in closing arguments to make those points.
And I think that there is, for reasons we discussed about how the prosecution is handling this case, I think Stormy Daniel's cross-examination is going to go very bad for the prosecution.
I think there will be enough fair-minded jurors to say this should there's not enough evidence for a conviction here.
And they should do that.
This is an abusive case for which there should be some type of reckoning.
And let's not forget, Phil, that the true star witness of this case is Michael Cohen.
And whatever cross, you know, we're in the midst of cross with Stormy, resumes on Thursday, whatever cross she gets will pale in comparison to what Trump's lawyers are going to do to Michael Cohen.
So are you at all newly optimistic about a possible acquittal or hung jury?
Yeah, well, Michael Cohen is like the ideal witness.
Like this is the kind of witness that I dream about being able to have on cross station, not only because he's a convicted felon and all that, but because of all the prior inconsistent statements.
And I'm going to go through all of them and I'm going to take my time and I'm going to make sure that I have fun with this and show the jury that he blows hot and cold at the same time and he can't keep his story straight.
The thing about the jury, though, and I agree that there's probably going to be an acquittal.
Excuse me, not an acquittal.
I don't think there's going to be an acquittal.
I think it's going to be a mistrial based on a hung jury.
And here's why.
Remember, there are two lawyers on this jury.
Normally, I don't want a lawyer on my jury because then you wind up with a jury of one effectively, because the other jurors oftentimes would defer to the lawyer back in the jury room.
However, if you have a case where you have two lawyers, it's very seldom that two lawyers agree completely on everything.
So they've got that going for them.
If you have disagreement in the jury room, that's a good thing for Donald Trump.
But there's so much about this case that is in the weeds legally.
The things that we've been talking about here today, for example, is minutiae that might get missed by the average layperson on the jury, but a lawyer in the jury, or maybe two of them back there at least, might be able to understand the finer points of the legal arguments.
And if even if they hate Trump, maybe they love the justice system enough to understand that they've got to put their passion, their bias, and their prejudice out of their mind.
And they've got to base their decision on the law and the facts and do the right thing.
And if you can get one or two or three in that jury room that are fair-minded in that way, then I think Trump stands a chance.
And let's not pretend that a hung jury is a victory.
It really is because this case will be tried again.
No, it won't be.
All right.
I still maintain he's going to be convicted.
I don't think he should be, but I think he will be.
I think it all comes down to the jury instructions, and they're going to be extremely favorable and wrongheaded and will lead the jury right to guilty.
I don't have any doubt that Juan Merchant will come through for the prosecution in approving the final jury instructions just as they want them.
Phil, Julian, a pleasure.
Thanks to both of you so much for joining me today.
Kevin is great.
Thanks for having us, Megan.
All right, guys, all the best.
And we are back tomorrow.
Everybody will see you then.
Thanks for listening.
Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly Show.
No BS, no agenda, and no
Export Selection