NY: Convicted Felon Donald Trump!

[○∙◄☻¥tπ[╪AV┼cVê└]

Trump is headed for aquittal here.
Even Senator Joe Manchin thinks NY Trail doesn't make sense
https://twitter.com/mkraju/status/1792629616399544376

I thought the further south you went, the further south Trump's odds got, but I guess he got some favorable rulings in Florida.

[brucejoel99]

Trump is headed for aquittal here.
Even Senator Joe Manchin thinks NY Trail doesn't make sense

https://x.com/mkraju/status/1792629616399544376

So he doesn't give a sh*t about the willful retention of classified documents?

[soundchaser]

I had no idea Manchin was on the jury!

[brucejoel99]

https://twitter.com/kaitlancollins/status/1792701064254238975

What happened inside the courtroom when the press was kicked out as Judge Merchan admonished Robert Costello:

Judge Merchan: "Sir, your conduct is contemptuous right now. I'm putting you on notice that your conduct is contemptuous. If you try to stare me down one more time, I will remove you from the stand. I will strike his entire testimony; do you understand me?"

MR. BOVE: "Yes, Judge. I understand."

When Costello asked if he could say something, Merchan said: "No. No. This is not a conversation."

[Ferguson97]

So dumb question, can the defense just drag this out as long as they want? Can the judge force them to rest their case?

[soundchaser]

So dumb question, can the defense just drag this out as long as they want? Can the judge force them to rest their case?

The judge can move things along, AFAIK. The defense has to make clear how many witnesses they'll call, how long they expect redirect to take, etc.

[Holmes]

The defense really fumbled the ball here with that whole Costello matter.

[Chancellor Tanterterg]

The defense really fumbled the ball here with that whole Costello matter.

I never understood why they were calling him; it was clearly not going to go well.  But yeah, not the note they’d want to end the day on.

[emailking]

I think they know they're probably going lose and thought they had momentum after Cohen and wanted to go for a kill shot. A risk that doesn't seem to have paid off.

[I spent the winter writing songs about getting better]

I'm not sure about this "Cohen is sleazy" line of attack anyway....wouldn't a pretty good chunk of prosecution witnesses in most cases be sleazy? Anyone who is an informant would be likely a criminal, and what about anyone granted immunity to testify? An immunity deal only makes sense if that person also committed crimes.

I'm reminded of a Law & Order episode (yes, that show is not always legally accurate, yadda yadda) involving a teenage girl who solicited on an in-universe version of Facebook to find a guy to murder her mother, all people who interacted with her on the site except one came forward, it was later determined that he did not because he was 21 and had sex with her when she was 16, so he agreed to testify only when he was granted immunity from statutory rape...he stated that he assumed that she was just joking when asking him to kill her mother and thus he said he would do it but never thought she would expect him to follow through, until one day when she asked him flat out when he was going to do it after they had sex and he admitted he had no intention of doing so and she started screaming at him to leave. Sounds like a guy most people wouldn't hold in high moral standards, but his testimony was the key in-universe and probably would in the real world as well. In Cohen's case he gave testimony before Congress in exchange for a reduced sentence...don't real life criminals do that all the the time? The defense pointing out such a person is a criminal kind of misses the point.

[HisGrace]

I mean Trump is sleazy too so why don't we send him to jail just for that?

[Landslide Lyndon]

Why are Trump cultists celebrating that Merchan's behavior guarantees a Trump conviction will be overturned by an appeals court?
Was it really that unprecedented and out of line what he did with Costello?

[GeorgiaModerate]

Why are Trump cultists celebrating that Merchan's behavior guarantees a Trump conviction will be overturned by an appeals court?
Was it really that unprecedented and out of line what he did with Costello?

Because Dershowitz went on Fox last night and said the judge violated Trump’s constitutional right to a public trial by kicking the media when he cleared the courtroom to admonish Costello.  Which is a ludicrous theory.

[emailking]

Yeah the jury wasn't even present and sidebars outside of the public eye happen all the time.

[dspNY]

I thought Trump had a decent chance to get a hung jury after Cohen’s testimony but Costello was so damaging to Trump that I actually think he gets convicted. The jurors are going to hold Costello’s behavior on the stand against Trump. Huge own goal by the defense calling Costello and it was likely Trump overruling his lawyers who initially planned to simply rest without calling witnesses

[GeorgiaModerate]

The defense has rested.

[wbrocks67]

I thought Trump had a decent chance to get a hung jury after Cohen’s testimony but Costello was so damaging to Trump that I actually think he gets convicted. The jurors are going to hold Costello’s behavior on the stand against Trump. Huge own goal by the defense calling Costello and it was likely Trump overruling his lawyers who initially planned to simply rest without calling witnesses

Honestly, a lot of this has been own goals by Team Trump tbh. Not only the Costello incident, but most of the issues have also arisen from Blanche's behavior as well.

[Penn_Quaker_Girl]

https://twitter.com/AnnaBower/status/1792915076313198886

Obviously I'm biased (and also spending a beautiful day off inside because head cold), but this hardly seems like the sort of thing that the defense wanted by calling Costello.

Add to that a communication from Cohen, telling Costello to buzz off and that [Cohen] is explicitly not [Costello's] client, and it leaves me wondering what the defense's strategy here was. 

[GeorgiaModerate]

https://twitter.com/BradMossEsq/status/1792929097829564723

[wbrocks67]

https://twitter.com/ArmandoNDK/status/1792915642108047500

[Hindsight was 2020]

This gets back to what I was saying last week when there was the freak out about how the defense ripped apart Cohen’s character. There is too much of a paper trail and collaborating evidence to his testimony

[emailking]

Both sides rest in Trump hush money trial

Former President Trump’s defense rested its brief case Tuesday after calling just two witnesses in the criminal hush money trial in New York.

Trump ultimately did not take the stand, despite repeatedly saying that he would be willing to testify in his own defense.

The prosecution rested its case Monday, after trying to rehabilitate the sometimes rocky testimony of Trump's former lawyer Michael Cohen, their key witness in the case.

Closing arguments are expected to take place next Tuesday.

https://www.cnn.com/webview/politics/live-news/trump-hush-money-trial-05-21-24/index.html

[dspNY]

I thought Trump had a decent chance to get a hung jury after Cohen’s testimony but Costello was so damaging to Trump that I actually think he gets convicted. The jurors are going to hold Costello’s behavior on the stand against Trump. Huge own goal by the defense calling Costello and it was likely Trump overruling his lawyers who initially planned to simply rest without calling witnesses

Honestly, a lot of this has been own goals by Team Trump tbh. Not only the Costello incident, but most of the issues have also arisen from Blanche's behavior as well.

Now I think the jury will convict on the misdemeanors of falsifying business records. That is a slam dunk. The judge will instruct the jurors to consider both a misdemeanor and felony conviction I believe. Politically a misdemeanor conviction doesn’t hurt Trump much but a felony could be a big political hit. Convicting on the felony (to cover up the election crime) is tougher but if I had to guess the jury will convict simply based on the defense’s behavior at trial. Reporting out of the courtroom indicated that the jurors largely did not pay attention when the defense was trying to make its case. That said I still think there is about a 1 in 3 chance the jury could hang

[emailking]

Assuming misdemeanor only becomes allowed and they convict on misdemeanors and not felonies, I think it means either they don't understand that part of the law or they don't believe Cohen. Because if you believe Cohen's testimony, seems clear Trump was only worried about the effect on the election. Pecker also spoke to that somewhat, but it was more based on his impression of Trump's intentions, whereas Trump made it more explicit with Cohen.

[Brittain33]

I had no idea Manchin was on the jury!

Centrism is when you accept half the cases and reject half the cases