The leftists at MSNBC dissected the latest in former President Donald Trump’s New York civil fraud trial, with legal analysts weighing in on “threatening” voicemails against the judge and his staff.
MSNBC guest host Ali Velshi tackled the topic of the gag order against Trump as he gave a platform Monday to former assistant U.S. attorney Andrew Weissmann and legal analyst Lisa Rubin, who characterized Trump’s recent comments as “racist” and “antisemitic.”
“Tell me about the connection for anyone who doesn’t sort of understand the legality of this, of Jack Smith using stuff that’s related to the New York civil fraud trial for his own trial?” Velshi asked Weissmann on “Deadline: White House.”
“Well, you have two judges, one in a criminal case in D.C. and one in a civil case in New York, dealing with a similar issue, which is that Donald Trump is a defendant and he is speaking in ways that the government thinks and the court has agreed, the trial court has agreed, endangers the integrity of the judicial process. That judicial process can be a civil case, as in New York or a criminal case, as in DC,” Weissmann responded.
“Both of those so-called gag orders are on appeal and both are stayed pending appeal, meaning that they are not yet in effect pending the outcome of that appellate process. But the reason they relate to each other is the history of violence, a history of threats to witnesses, potential jurors, to court personnel, to prosecutors is relevant to both cases,” he claimed.
“The reason I bring this up is because this is not about witness interference and or court interference in the normal way. It’s this permission structure of harassment and intimidation and antisemitism,” Velshi chimed in as he pointed to “hundreds of threatening” messages Judge Arthur Engoron and his staff have allegedly received.
In arguing against the gag order, Trump’s attorneys on Monday emphasized that the former president cannot be held responsible for the speech of others, which “while vile and reprehensible, do not constitute a clear and present danger of imminent harm as required under established precedent.”
“And you can see that also in the affirmation from the court officer,” Rubin responded to Velshi’s setup, “because in addition to excerpting some of the most vile threats against the principal law clerk, which primarily have to do with her relationship with the judge and her religion, encoded in those are also threats against Letitia James as the New York attorney general that take on a very transparently racist nature.”
“And also threats against the judge who himself is Jewish and therefore, those are antisemitic. And there’s also a suggestion of homophobia. It’s not just a suggestion. There’s more than a whiff of it. There’s some real homophobia in those threats, too. So when you talk about an environment of hate, it is sort of a cataclysm of isms, so to speak, in that affirmation,” she asserted.
NEW: Trump’s team has filed its reply on the stay of the New York gag order. There is no response to, much less mention of, the court system’s documentation of the serious and extensive threats to Judge Engoron and his law clerk. 1/https://t.co/giDg5Ekuhn
— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) November 27, 2023
“You start to see evidence of what happens when Trump issues a threat both in kind and the extent of that. One of the things you didn’t mention about that information is that the court security officer says, I’ve transcribed the voicemails that have been left for Judge and Goren and his chambers and for the principal law clerk. They fill 275 single-spaced pages,” Rubin continued.
“So to give that information to the D.C. Circuit, I think is particularly valuable to show. There’s not just a correlation between, you know, a Trump post and an uptick in a threat environment, but you can actually quantify that. And excerpted and presented to a court in an evidentiary fashion,” she concluded.
Rubin corrected herself on social media after giving a play-by-play of the latest in the Trump trial.
When I’m wrong, I’ll tell you—and I missed something today. Roughly 1872 pages into Trump’s filing this morning, his lawyers *do* respond to the court system’s cataloguing of threats against Judge Engoron and his principal law clerk. 1/ pic.twitter.com/DNA4QPMOoF
— Lisa Rubin (@lawofruby) November 27, 2023
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Originally from New York, Powers graduated from New York University and eventually made her way to sunny South Florida. Powers also contributes to BizPac Review.
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