Before we get a verdict, it’s important to recognize that this is justice, regardless of whatever the verdict is. It is a billowing outrage that the three other cases against Donald Trump have been stymied to date by judicial corruption (certainly that’s the case in the two federal prosecutions; the Georgia case is more complicated). But those are different cases. This trial is in a different jurisdiction and about totally different facts and crimes. Both sides were allowed to make their case before a judge who did a good job of controlling the process. Now it’s in the hands of a jury.
I am certainly hoping for a conviction, mostly because the evidence is overwhelming and irrefutable. I’ve always thought this was essentially a jury nullification case. Trump’s only hope for an acquittal is for the jury to essentially say: we’ve heard what you say the law is and we’ve heard the evidence but we just don’t think this is a crime. More realistically, I think Trump’s real hope is a hung jury. Regardless, this is our system. Donald Trump deserves to have his fate in the hands of a jury. And now he does.
Alas, our beloved co-host Kate is sick, so there will be no podcast this week. See you all next week with a new episode!
I wanted to give you a brief update on the server outage we had off and on for much of Tuesday afternoon.
First, we apologize that this happened and especially on such a news-packed day. As members you pay for us to bring you the news and for the site to be online. We take that responsibility very seriously. Unfortunately, we do not yet know the precise cause of Tuesday’s outage. It appears to have originated on our server host’s side. So that left us for much of the day in the uncomfortable position of largely having to wait on their team to figure out and fix the problem. (If you had a problem accessing the site, believe me — it was extremely frustrating on our end too.) We ended the day making some triage changes to keep the site online until the underlying cause is determined.
My words here may seem lawyerly or overcautious. It’s not that. We just don’t want to say more than we know or speculate and have to correct the record later.
Once we know the precise cause we’ll report back to you.
Let’s grant the Trump lawyers their point and say Michael Cohen is the “MVP of Liars.” He’s certainly an accomplished liar. But even though I’m probably preaching to the choir, let’s look at this. This is Donald Trump’s argument, the guy who is plagued by all the turncoats, morons, liars and criminals who he’s hired to work for him. Again, Donald Trump is insisting someone is a liar and can’t be trusted. If Michael Cohen is the MVP, what is Donald Trump? The Babe Ruth of Liars?
Read MoreA very ill-timed site outage deprived many of you of Josh Kovensky’s liveblogging of the closing arguments in the Trump trial. Our vendor is still working under the hood to stabilize things, but the liveblog is back up now. Thanks for your patience. I promise it has been as frustrating for us as it has been for you.