I finally got to speak to my boss about the trial. Of course, he thinks the whole thing is a giant conspiracy. The timing is on purpose to interfere with the election. These kind of charges are almost never charged. They could have just charged the whole thing as one charge. They could have left these all as misdemeanors. The timing of the sentencing is suspect. Trump wasn’t allowed to call his witness list to testify. No way to get a fair jury in New York.
I may have forgotten one or two others, but I’m tired now.
We really do like each other, which is good because I’m never changing his mind nor he mine.
I came to say the same thing. The first jury I was on was slightly complicated (nothing compared to the one we are discussing) and we wanted to be methodical. We took a couple of days.
So, if he was able to demonstrate that the points that you rested your opinion on were false and that a pure look at the evidence would lead you to conclude the opposite as you do currently, you would not follow the evidence?
It might be worth pointing out to him that if Trump wanted a speedy trial, all he had to do was decline to waive time and the case would need to be tried within 60 days (or whatever the statutory time frame is in that jurisdiction). The timing of the trial is always and entirely up to the defendant.
This springs from the whole thing where the defense were not allowed to call to the stand experts intended to interpret the law which, as Judge Mechan said, was his job. They’ve extrapolated it to “They didn’t allow any witnesses!”.
Trump’s lawyer wanted to call a former FEC official to instruct the jury on election law. That is the sole purview of the judge, who correctly disallowed it.
This is like when Trump was forbidden to attack witnesses or the jury members in public tweets, this was extrapolated to “Trump was not allowed to testify!”
I tried, but he couldn’t provide any names to dispute. He just said ‘you know, that guy, the one who is the top legal scholar who wanted to talk about how no law was broken’. I asked if he meant Dershowitz, but he didn’t know any names. He can be a bit slippery when it suits him.
Pretty much every day after court, when Trump spoke to the media, he would mention “a lot of legal scholars say this case should never have been brought.” He never specified names, or if he did, I didn’t catch them. He did specify names of opinion columnists, but I don’t remember names of legal scholars.
Maybe he’s doing what Trump has demonstrated: mention legal scholars, but never specify them.