that is tonight's the reidout. i'm sticking around for tonight's special coverage of trump on trial, new york versus donald trump, with the whole team, including rachel maddow, who was inside the courtroom for today's opening statements and testimony. that starts right now. >> the people of new york

versus donald j trump. >> i should be a lot of different places right now campaigning. i'm sitting here. >> for the first time in history, prosecutors layout a criminal case against a former american president to a jury. >> this case is about a conspiracy to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. >> tonight, the opening statements from the prosecution and the defense and the first witness takes the stand. >> we should be expecting a lot more of david . >> rachel maddow was inside the courtroom to see it all. >> we got a road map as to how the case is going to go. >> as donald trump goes on trial. >> he seems old, tired, and mad. >> tonight, which maddow, lawrence o'donnell, alex wagner, stephanie ruhle, msnbc legal experts are all here.

special coverage of trump on trial begins. now. >> thank you for joining us tonight for this special primetime recap of the first ever criminal trial of former u.s. president, the first ever criminal trial of a major parties summative nominee as their candidate for president. i know rachel maddow here in msnbc headquarters along with lawrence o'donnell and chris hayes and sake. legal experts andrew weissman and catherine christian will be keeping us on the straight and narrow. we have lisa rubin here tonight and suzanne craig of the new york times, who were both at the trial. lisa and suzanne and katie were all in the overflow room at the trial today. i was in the actual courtroom, which makes it sound like i got

the better seat but i will tell you, there are advantages and disadvantages to both ways of sitting in on the trial and a lot of them have to do with the five senses. we will talk about that a little bit tonight. the trial got underway at 9:30 eastern time this morning and ran for about three hours before breaking early for both the passover holiday and for one juror to get to an emergency dentist appointment. i hope it went okay. that short day's proceedings brought us a whole bunch of important news about this case. we got, first thing, a substantive ruling from judge merchan about, effectively, what prosecutors will be allowed to ask trump if he chooses to take the stand in his own defense. now, this is something that is called a sandoval hearing that happened at the end of the week last week. this was judge merchan's ruling on that sandoval hearing. basically in nonelegalese, what it is is if trump is going to present himself as a witness, prosecutors will want to call his credibility as a witness and question and they will want

to do that by telling the jury about bad things trump has done or has that, things that would reflect poorly on his believability as a witness in this proceeding. prosecutors have to ask the judge about that. prosecutors that ask permission to raise 13 different bad things about former president trump in front of the jury. judge merchan ruled today they are allowed to raise 6 of those 13 things but not the rest of them. now, is that good news or bad news for the prosecution ? good news or bad news for the defense? i don't know. we will get advice from our legal experts tonight as to how much of a win or loss that is for either side. that was right out of the gate a substantive thing about how much of these jurors will get to hear about trump if he testifies. this is done out of fairness to the defense. the defense basically needs to know whether it is worth it to put trump on the stand.

they can't compel trump to speak but if he chooses to take the stand, they now understand the parameters about what he might be asked about. and, that will help them fairly make a decision about whether or not it is a good idea for him to actually become a witness in his own case. that happened today. that was first. it went fast. we also today got opening statements from each site today and each side completed their opening statements today. the opening statements admittedly, i am a dork but i found them fascinating. and, they were so different from one another. you think of opening statements as being a boilerplate or something where you can expect that they are like. well, these were two totally different ways of doing it. the prosecution started. they laid out a dispassionate, straightforward, very linear, very blunt case. started this way.

stickel angelo, matthew colangelo, prosecutor. good morning, your honor, members of the jury. this case is about a criminal conspiracy and a cover up. the defendant, donald trump orchestrated a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. then he covered up that criminal conspiracy by laying in his new york business records over and over and over again. in june of 2015, donald trump announced his candidacy for resident in the 2016 election. a few month later, this conspiracy begin. that is how it started from the prosecution. we will talk in detail about the prosecution's argument, the sort of blunt, streamlined, linear nature of the case and the way they are making it. this in total contrast, this was the opening of the opening statement from the defense. todd plans, defense counsel for president trump. good morning, your honor, good morning, just, good morning. resident trump is innocent. president trump did not commit any crimes. the manhattan district attorney's office would never have brought this case. you've

heard this a few times already this morning, you are going to hear a lot more during this trial. the people, the government, they have the burden of proof to prove president trump guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. what that means, as judge merchan said a few minutes ago, is that president trump is presumed innocent . he is cloaked in innocence. and, that cloak of innocence does not leave president trump today, it doesn't leave him at any day during this trial and it won't leave him when you all deliberate. you will find that he is not guilty. now, president trump, you have seen him for years and years and years. you have seen on television, you seen photos of him, you've seen articles about him. he is someways larger than life but he's also here in this courtroom doing what any of us would do, defending himself. you are going to hear me, as i've done already today, and others, even witnesses, refer to him as resident trump. this

is a title that he has learned because he was our 45th president. we will: president trump's out of respect for the office that he held from 2017 to 2021. as everybody knows, it is the office he is running for right now. he is the republican nominee. but, and this is important, he's not just our former president, he's not just donald trump that you have seen on tv and read about and seen photos of, he's also a man, he's a husband, he's a father, and he is a person, just like you and just like me. what the people just did for 45 minutes is present to you what appeared to be a very clean, nice story. it is not. it is not simple, as the people just described. " you can see the difference in approach here, right ? you think you know what an opening statement is. those are both opening statements but they are from different planets. and you know, a good defense will always reasonably try to make it seem like the prosecution's case is less straightforward than it seems. the defense, after all, just has to inject some reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the

defendant. they don't need to prove him innocent. in this case, though, trumps defense has bluntly proclaimed him innocent. that was the first line of their opening statement to the jury. president trump's is innocent. to make that case, to bolster that case, his defense lawyers today, and this is a surprise to me as a lay observer of these matters, president trump's defense lawyers today found themselves also having to make a number of supporting claims about trumps behavior around this incident and these alleged crimes. and, they were claims that i think outside the courtroom and to those of us not on the jury observing this case, they are claims that will raise a lot of eyebrows. i do not know what their effect will be on the jury that these things are hard to sell. on a street corner or at a cocktail party or on tv. we will see if the jury buys them. claims that this. todd lynch, "when he became president in 2017, he put up a wall between himself and his

company. he put his entire company in a trust. he did this so that he could run the country and he wouldn't have anything to do with his company while he was president ." is that true? did donald trump effect put up a wall between himself and his company while he was president? did he have nothing to do with his company when he was president? i don't know what the jury will think of that claim. but, i mean, pick your example. remember when mike pence had a meeting in dublin, ireland as vice president but the trump administration had him stay on the other side of the island, the whole other side of the country, hours away from his meeting in dublin just so he could stay at a trump golf property while he was there? if vice president kamala harris was going to dublin for a meeting right now, as vice president of the united states, what do you think the odds are that she would be staying 181 miles away from dublin at? tell

me more about the wall between president trump and his committee. president trump's counsel claiming that trump paid michael cohen shirley for legal services and he definitely didn't pay him as a reimbursement for this hush money payment to stormy daniels, the woman they wanted to keep quiet ahead of the election about her claims of a sexual relationship with former president trump. they are claiming this really was just payment from trump to michael cohen for legal services, even though they also admitted to the jury today that michael cohen had been trumps lawyer for years and years and years and it would appear that michael cohen was never paid like this before in any of the other years that he worked for trump. president trump's defense counsel is also claiming that the allegations that stormy daniels made that she had a sexual encounter with donald trump was a false claim, a

false claim is what he said to the jury today. you can make of that what you will. the jury will be expected to believe these things because the claim from the defenses that donald trump is innocent. we now know that this is the nature of the defense they will not. they may have trump himself testified, they may not. they are going to make as much as possible over the fact that he is a former president. they will call him president over and over again in the courtroom. they will create what appears outside the courtroom to be an earth to narrative in which trump not only didn't have with stormy daniels, trump had nothing to do with his company well president. even though he apparently never paid michael cohen this way before, coincidentally after

michael cohen on his own volition and for his own reasons decided to take out a home equity line of credit in order to pay a star that he himself never met and never had with, coincidentally after michael cohen just decided to do that out of the goodness of his own heart for his own mysterious reasons that have nothing to do with donald trump, quits and that only after that happened, trump decided to start a new way of paying his longtime lawyer that involved $35,000.00 checks he signed in the oval office and it was all a coincidence and not of it had anything to do with the election. maybe. we will see. we are going to talk tonight about what prosecutors said about how they came up with the payment plan to michael cohen. personally, i unintentionally loudly started in court when i heard this, which was not at all polite. it annoyed the person sitting next to me. i will apologize and explain. we will talk about that. we will talk about the first witness, whose name is packer because the news guns like to tease us and test or maturity as catches. david packer was ceo of the company that used to run "the national enquirer". he was only on the stand for about half an hour but even just in that half an hour, he already gave prosecutors, it

would seem, a bunch of what they wanted. we are going to talk about how weird it was that when trumps defense counsel was giving his opening argument today, his opening statement to the jury today, there were multiple objections from the prosecutors, objections to the opening statement, including multiple objections that were sustained by the judge, which led to the judge multiple times stopping the opening statement and making all the lawyers in the room come up to the bench to talk to him in private. it was a bizarre thing to see in person. we will get advice on how odd that is as a matter of law and of trial procedure in new york. we will also tonight get to the card prosecutors have in their deck that seems logically unassailable, at least to noneborder observers of this case, a card prosecutors have in their deck that they showed

a little bit of today that goes to the absolute part of this matter. we heard no defense to it today from the other side, at least not yet. we will get to all of that in this primetime recap tonight, that is what we are here for. i want to start with my colleagues with overall impressions of how things went today, how things are starting off for the former president. chris. >> i have lots of thoughts. my one big take away, actually, was during the judge's instructions to the jury. the reason is that we have been doing this now, donald trump is down the escalator in 2015 so we've been doing this for nine years and there was this question of just how does a democratic society come to conclusions about things? you think about the metaphor of the court of public opinion. and, there are lots of reasons people believe what they believe about donald trump. and, what was fascinating in there is part of the reason so many people wanted this trial is that when he's giving instructions to the jury, he's giving them a methodology for divining the truth. he is talking to them and staying here are the ground rules. you guys are coming from all different kinds of places, you might have different politics

but here, we will all work on this methodology. you can assess people's credibility however you want, you have to actually work off the evidence, just basic stipulation. there's almost a part of me that wants there to be some small the democratic version of that in the court of public opinion but there was something kind of bracing about that moment simply because he has thrived in an environment for so long in defining what to me seemed the obvious ways that you should come to conclusions about the world. so, here you have this cross- section of people. i also thought the level of language and intellect and knowledge he was assuming of the jury was great. he was not talking down to them. he was like you are smart, grown-up people. this is how we are going to do it. it felt to me that the reason there is so much on this is partly because of how haywire he has gone outside courtroom that there is some little miniature version of something happening in there about

discourse and reasons and arguments that was very exciting to listen to. >> there's something about the kind of politician trump is, which is about an appeal to emotion and reason doesn't apply. this is the epitome of that. >> vary from the, this is how we are going to do it. i'm not telling you what conclusions to come to but the method for coming to conclusions, we will all agree on. >> it is the opposite of what we experience in public life. >> reassuring, in many ways. what struck me, you outlined it so well in the beginning, was the difference between the opening statements. this is why it is so helpful to have people watching and in the courtroom. reading the transcript, as i did, i have a lot of post-it notes here, it struck me that the defense was like a circus leader kind of. a couple of things clearly on a note card and the prosecution's case could picture what this guy was like in a study group, i would want to be in his study group. he has an outline, he writes all the notes on it. even as dirty in a good way as that was, what was also striking to me is this is a case about falsifying business

records. used so much real estate and words in his opening statement to lay out the case for why trump is a guy who paid to cover up information from the american public multiple times. i thought that was interesting. the national enquirer aspect of this, which is so important, was so dominant this morning. >> this is a story about the national enquirer, at least thus far. david being the first witness, i think, is both testimony to that and not an accident and that if trump and "the national enquirer" were in a criminal conspiracy, as prosecutors allege, we all know, almost all we need to know about trump, most of what we are going to learn is about the national enquirer and ami. >> let me start with my bead, which is outside the building. among the people, who i will now call the people and not the protesters because they weren't protesting. i counted three, maybe i am overcooking, sorry trump supporters, i will call them. you couldn't hear a word from

them. they kept everything at a very conversational tone. for more, chris says you couldn't hear what they were saying to each other. the only person you could hear was a loudmouth guy who was fairly close to them yelling at them about bill clinton balancing the budget. that was it. that is what the people had to say out there in the street. >> it is new york, he might have been doing that since 1992. that might be his regular spot. >> in the courtroom, it is the first time we have heard the defense. we've had the indictment so we knew an awful lot about what we were going to hear in the prosecution opening statement. this is the defense opening statement. and, there's clear, there are clearly two things the client is demanding. one, call me mr. president. his lawyer gets up there and, as you showed, gets into this speech about not only why he is

calling him president trump but by implication white everyone in this room should call him president trump. and, you are some kind of punk if you don't. that is what he was trying to suggest. the other point that seems to be a client directed instruction, because there was no need to do this, especially no need to do it today to claim that donald trump did not have any sexual contact with stormy daniels. that is a claim beyond the needs of the defense. they don't need to claim that. they might decide, tactically, to claim that at some point later in this trial. i can't think of why. the only way they can actually enter that into evidence, the only way they can enter it and that is by donald trump taking the witness stand. he's not going to take the witness stand, for a lot of reasons, including everything we saw in sandoval today. but, to assert that in that opening statement, that that jury will be in the room

without any proof or even testimony from donald trump about what happened there, it certainly raises the questions of the prosecution if they were on the fence about calling stormy daniels, if they weren't sure. there is a theory of the case where you don't have to call stormy daniels. what did that do to the prosecution's thinking about calling stormy daniels? if they want to claim what the prosecution thinks is a lie in their opening statement, is that something worth really going after, that very issue of when they were alone in the hotel room, what did they do? by the way, jury, what do you think that guy did? here she is. here she is. that real person in the room. it is one of those things where you just have to wonder, you know, what was the defense lawyer thinking and the answer is likely to be that was an order from the client. >> there was that quotable

remark about stormy daniels from mr. trump's defense counsel today in which he said stormy daniels does not matter. her testimony will not matter. why are you talking about her ? >> it matters now because you just said she is lying. >> you just made stormy daniels testimony matter much more than it did yesterday in the theory of this case. >> katie. >> for me, so much time was spent before this actual first criminal trial of donald trump launched about the importance of this case and i felt just the two hours we were in court today that you saw why we should care. and, more importantly, why the jurors should care about this case. that is always the most important job for a prosecutor. these jurors are just doing civic duty. some of them are laboring against their better condition intentions of being there and their concerns about being there. when you heard magical angel get up-to-date, he consistently

told the jury this is why it matters. that makes a difference because 34 felonies is nothing to sneer at. even one could put donald trump in prison for up to four years. when you view the prosecution laid out a clear road map, that is what openings are for, they are not for argument, they are for laying out a road map of what the evidence is, who are the players here? why are they so critical to the story ? it all starts to make sense. that is why you set the tone in opening. that is why plants meandering and wondering and trying to pick something off the tree he wants to decide to talk about sent a message to the jury in the wrong way. you don't have to be here. but no, you have to be here and the reason why is what the prosecution told he was going to be the crux of this case. it is not just about the falsification, it is to

influence the outcome of the presidential election. it is not the private acts between two people, it is how did it impact the american voters at large. i thought that was the most important thing we got out of openings today. >> in terms of your assessment having seen lots of trials and having seen people addressed the jury for the first time like this, i feel like as a nonlawyer watching those two different styles, i note one of those styles works better on me in the moment. but, i don't want to presume that that is true for juries. the looser style that we are seeing, the more emotive, emotional digressive style that we are seeing from mr. blanche, from trump's attorney, is that necessarily less effective with the jury or is it a matter of a personal match between the counselor and the audience ?

>> it is a great question. it really is sometimes of personal preference. but, you know, i respect the concern about not having some type of confirmation bias going into the we that you are assessing how these openings were done. but, there's a reason why they are opening statements. more importantly, there is a reason why the objections by the prosecution got sustained. because, when mr. blanche went beyond what he was allowed to do, not only did the objections consistent, you can watch law and order all day long and understand an objection gets sustained, that means you did something wrong. did you notice how it interrupted flow? transit one gets up, he does his thing and sits down. they have to go sidebar multiple times and so mr. blanche had to interrupt and interrupt and interrupt. that sends a message to the jury that mr. blanche is doing something wrong. whether or not the more emotive, casual style is working, the fact that he's getting chastised by the judge sends a message that the jurors came to the door. >> very good point. we will talk about the sustaining of those objections and the interruptions to donald trump's lawyers opening statements today. we will talk about, listen, if you were in charge of defending donald trump, what would you

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welcome back to our primetime recap of today's proceedings in the criminal trial of former president donald trump. now, as lawrence o'donnell just

mentioned, today was the first time that we've heard from the defense. referred from the prosecution in the fact with the indictment, with the announcement of charges that led to today's proceedings. but, this is the first time we got to see the defense go through their paces. for the defense counsel for former president trump, we did get a sense in their opening statements today about how it looks like they are going to try to defend their client. if today's opening statements are any guide, they will stress that mr. trump is a former president and they are going to always call him president trump. they are going to stress beyond that that he, right now, is the presumptive republican nominee for president again, or, as his defense counsel called them today, the republican nominee, not even presumptive. they are going to claim that every aspect of this was an innocent act by trump, that there wasn't an underlying sexual encounter to cover up, even though that would seem to be immaterial to the charges. they will seem to be claiming,

again, if today's opening statements are any guide, that michael cohen, trumps lawyer, paid a star on his own accord and for his own reasons that trump only paid michael cohen for legal services, just like he always had, he just changed to a weird new way of paying him after the star thing because, well, they will think of something. but, if you were in this defense team, if you were in charge of coming up with your defense to mr. trump, here is the part of the prosecution's case that would seem to be the most difficult thing to explain logically. if you are going to try to mount a defense that prompted nothing at all wrong, that there was no conspiracy to corrupt the election, as the prosecution put it at the top of their opening statements today, well, this would seem to be the toughest thing logically that you are up against. here it is. this is from the opening statement from executor matthew colangelo. " sorry, this is not putting

it. this is the introduction. at this point, matthew colangelo has explained to the jury what he called a criminal conspiracy between trump and ami, american media, to publish positive stories about trump, to publish negative stories about trumps rivals, to find negative stories about trump that hadn't been published yet and to pay the sources of those stories to make them shut up and not tell anybody about those stories before the election. the prosecution has explained to the jury at this point that ami, american media, "the national enquirer", they found a doorman, a doorman named dino, who said trump had fathered a child with a housekeeper. then there was a second one, a woman named karen mcdougal, who said she had an affair with trump, they paid her to not tell anybody about that story as well. then there was the third one, stormy daniels. although, at this point, the

"the national enquirer" was willing to make arrangements for her to be paid, to be quiet about that story, by that point, they were not ready to put up additional money. so, michael cohen put up the money for that. the prosecutors explained all of this to the jury and then he says this. prosecutor matthew colangelo. " michael cohen made that payment at donald trump's direction and for his benefit and he did it with a specific goal of influencing the outcome of the election. now look, no politician wants bad press. but, the evidence at trial will show this was not spin or communication strategy. this was a planned, coordinated, long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help donald trump get elected legal expenditures, to silence people who had something bad to say about his behavior using doctored corporate records and bank forms to conceal those payments along the way. it was election fraud, pure and simple. we will never know it it doesn't matter if this conspiracy was the difference maker in a close election but you will seem evidence in the defendants own words from his social media posts, from the

speeches at campaign rallies, and other events, you will see in his own words making crystal clear he was certainly concerned about how all of this could hurt his standing with voters and with female voters in particular. you will also see evidence that on election night as news outlets got closer to calling the election for donald trump, the lawyer for both stormy daniels and karen mcdougal texted dylan howard, and editor of "the national enquirer" and he said, "what have we done? about a month after the election, david , the ceo of american media, then authorized release both dino sajudin, the doorman, and karen mcdougal from their nondisclosure agreements. say that again. about a month after the election, david authorized release the first two recipients of catch and kill money, release them from their nondisclosure agreements once the election was over. having paid for the stories in order to keep them from the

public before election day, david and ami told mcdougall and dino sajudin they were no longer bound by the nondisclosure agreements. " think about what that means. this claim, right, from the defense is that none of these payment schemes had anything to do with the election. who knows what michael cohen was doing paying that star, donald trump was paying for legal fees. the defense saying this had nothing to do with the election. the prosecution says they will present evidence that trump and american media paid for all of these people to be silent until the election was over. once the election was over, they then released all these people from these agreements to be silent because once the election happened, they didn't care anymore because, at that point, mission accomplished because the mission was to influence the election. once the election was done, there is no more need for these agreements. the mission was the election. the mission was not to protect

his brand, the mission wasn't to save his family embarrassment, it was to keep these people silent, to pay them to be silent, specifically and only in order to win the election, full stop. the prosecution calls this a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election, one that was covered up by lying on business records. logically, that releasing people from the agreements once the election was over, logically that would seem to be the crux of this case, if the prosecution can prove it. legally, though, we will see. lawrence o'donnell. >> rachel, here we arrive at the different burdens of the prosecution and defense. the prosecution is going for logic and you are following their logic and their logic takes you over to "the national enquirer" and it takes you over to this guy who told "the national enquirer" trump fathered a child. everyone in the courtroom agrees that that wasn't true.

then it takes you over to karen mcdougal. those 22 who are released from their confidentiality agreement after the election. what the defense will stay in final argument is that has nothing to do with this case, absolutely nothing. because, remember, what the defense needs in final argument is not logic. they are not trying to take you through a flawlessly logical stories, they are just trying to tug at any little doubt they can find, anywhere. and, they will lean in final argument on that agreement, in that courtroom, that that guy who told "the national enquirer" donald trump illegitimately fathered a child was not telling the truth, wasn't telling the truth, just like stormy daniels wasn't telling the truth about donald trump. donald trump gets hustled by these people all the time and we have to deal with them in different ways. donald trump has said publicly

this happens to every man, every man, that includes you, chris hayes, every man who is public. every man in the public eye is constantly paying off tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of these deals all the time. that is donald trump's claim and he's going to say this was happening to me all the time. and all of that mcdougall stuff, everything involving david everything involving "the national enquirer" will be thrown out the door in the final argument of donald trump's defense lawyers because of none of that is a charged crime, not a single thing in any of that. it is these business records. the other piece of the defense we heard about the business records is this is the name of the woman who made up the checks, this is the name of the bookkeeper centered in the record who filled out the forms. this is the name of the person who told her to say legal services and donald trump never told any of them to say legal

services. that is the defense. donald trump didn't tell them to keep the books this way and the money, by the way, was not for having anything to do with stormy daniels. that is the entire defense. there is no other piece of the defense. it has nothing to do with other people's nondisclosure agreements and all of that stuff. and, of course, all of that stuff makes perfect sense when a prosecution is building you this flawless table that has logical, four logical links to it, defense is going to come along and say no, it has no legs, the table has no legs. >> we released all these people from these agreements after the election because we love late november and that is the time when we release everyone from their agreements. >> the defense will feel no need to explain at all why those nondisclosure agreements

were no longer enforceable. they would have any need to when they are in their final argument. they will throw something out there in the course of the trial but they won't feel compelled to expand. >> what you are talking about about the claim from dino sajudin being a false claim, what ami nevertheless agreed to pay for it and what michael cohen was paid and how they arrived at that amount was the sport your coffee out your nose in the court for a moment today. we will talk about that, including with andrew weissman and catherine christian, keeping us on the legal straight and narrow as we received with our primetime recap of today's criminal proceedings against former president donald trump. trump. auntie, you can't put that right in the dishwasher. watch me. with cascade platinum plus i have upped my dish game. i just scrape... load...

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welcome back to our primetime recap of today's criminal court proceedings against former president donald trump. i was at the courthouse today in manhattan. i was in the courtroom. for opening statements for this first criminal trial of a former president. i can report first-hand that the courtroom smells like old soup and stale breath. i can report that the police officers who policed the courtroom or working very hard and they appear to be very stressed. i can report that judge merchan is soft-spoken and has a what i think would be universally considered to be a pleasant voice. i can report that prosecutor matthew colangelo speaks exactly like seth meyers

speaks when seth meyers is not telling jokes. i can tell you that the first witness, david , accidentally gave out his whole phone number today when the prosecutor just asked him to confirm the last four digits . he was trying to remember the last four digits and in order to get there in his head, he said the whole number out loud and didn't mean to do that. i can report that former president donald trump looks a lot older than he used to and that it seemed to me in my subjective take that he, he seemed miserable to be there. you know, i look a lot older than i used to look as well and i think anybody has the right to look miserable when they are sitting in a courtroom charged with dozens of felonies as a criminal defendant. the courtroom is bare-bones. it is not large. it is inelegant. it has unflattering lighting. like i said, it does not smell good and everybody is very tense. what i need to present to you with all of this information is

that given the choice, nobody would want to be there except, of course, journalists and reporters covering the most historical trial in american political history. to that end, i would also like to say that i am sorry to the journalists sitting immediately next to me because i unintentionally snorted out loud when this happened today at the trial. when i read this part of the transcript to do, you'll know why i said that. prosecutor matthew colangelo. "in january, 2017, before the defendant moved to washington to begin his presidency, michael cohen met with alan weisel burke of the trump organization to talk about how michael cohen was going to be reimbursed for the payoff to stormy daniels. he was the one of the defendants longest-serving and most trusted employees.

me the trump nor the trump organization could just write a check to michael cohen for $130,000.00 with a memo line that said reimbursement for star payoff. they had to disguise the nature of the repayment. they agreed to cook the books and make it look like the repayment was actually income. payments for services rendered instead of a reimbursement. allen weisselberg asked mr. cohen to bring a copy of a bank statement showing the $130,000.00 payment michael cohen had made to keep stormy daniels quiet before the election. allen weisselberg and michael cohen agreed to a total repayment amount of $420,000.00. here's how they got to that number. this is good. they started with $130,000.00 trump road michael cohen for the stormy daniels payoff. then, they added $50,000.00 for a separate reimbursement michael cohen was claiming, which had to do with tech services he paid for during the campaign. that adds up to 180. then they agreed to double that amount to $360,000 to account

for taxes. now, of course, if trump was just reimbursing michael cohen, there was no need to close it up for taxes. they doubled it because their plan was to call it income instead of a reimbursement. if michael cohen was getting money they were calling income, he would have to pay taxes on it. michael cohen was close to a 50% tax bracket. to make them whole on the $180,000 the defendant told him, they had to double the amount to 360. then, he added another $60,000 as a year end bonus and all that comes out to a total of $420,000. allen weisselberg wrote all of that down. whereupon i enjoyed the people sitting near me because i started out loud. he wrote it all down. if you were a fan of "the wire," this is the scene where stringer bell turns to the young man and says are you taking notes on it, no conspiracy? using a lot of swearwords. he was taking notes on a criminal conspiracy. prosecutor matthew colangelo.

" allen weisselberg wrote all of that down . the bank statement i told you about that he asked michael cohen to bring to the meeting, the bank statement from the essential consultants account, which showed the $130,000 wire michael cohen had made to keep stormy daniels quiet, you will see in this trial allen weisselberg's handwriting down the side of that bank statement laying out every one of the steps that i just described, showing how they converted the $130,000 payoff amount to the 420 grand michael cohen was going to get paid back as he grossed up way to disguise it not as reimbursement but as income and they took notes about it every step of the way and the prosecution has the notes." and then here's the kicker. matthew colangelo, "michael cohen and allen weisselberg met with trump, who approved the repayment amount of 420 grand on the stormy daniels payment

and a few other fences. you will see evidence at trial that trump was a very frugal businessman. he believed in pinching pennies, he believed in watching every dollar, he believed in negotiating every bill. it is all over all of the books he has written. he ran the trump organization with total control. you will hear testimony about his relentless focus on the bottom line. when it came time to pay michael cohen back for the catch and kill deal, you will see he didn't negotiate the price down, he doubled it and he doubled it so they could disguise it as income. you will hear evidence the trump organization was not in the practice of paying people twice what they owed for anything. this might be the only time that ever happened. trump's willingness to do so here shows just how important it was to him to hide the true nature of the illegal payment to ms. daniels and the overall election conspiracy that they had launched in august, 2015." prosecutors saying trump is paying a lot for this and he never pays for anything. that is how important and

sensitive this was. interestingly, moments later, the defense used the same set of facts to make the opposite point to the jury, saying yes, trump really is so cheap and so unwilling to pay for anything so, this must have been some other thing he was paying for. not the thing they have handwritten notes from his cfo about. joining us now is former fbi general counsel andrew weissman. also with us, former assistant district attorney in the manhattan district attorney's office, catherine christian. thank you both for being here. andrew, let me ask you first, was stringer bell right to ask allen weisselberg, are you taking notes on a criminal conspiracy, is the second part of your question >> you must've seen my notes because that is the page where i had the same reaction. so, one of the things that you listen for when you listen to openings on both sides is you know that there are witnesses

who will testify and think about how they are going to do, whether they have memory issues, whether they have good ability issues but then you look for what is the prosecution going to say with respect to hard evidence and they are the things that stood out to me was you had a reference to the tape recording that we've heard about, that is where donald trump is overheard saying hey, let's just pay the 130,000 in cash. that is a terrible tape for donald trump. second, there were references to telephone records at a critical time that the payments were first made by michael cohen to stormy daniels. where there are two calls that the prosecutor referenced between michael cohen and donald trump. the third was this, a fall off your chair moment where they have it in writing. what is so interesting is that the defense said the repayment was not reimbursement for the payment to stormy daniels. i do not know how they are going to deal with that when

you have these notes. remember, when you make a promise, when you say something at openings, as catherine knows, as katie knows, that comes back to haunt you. if you have overpromised, if you have made a misstatement, both sides are listening for that because they are going to bring it up again in closing. >> catherine, is it important that we don't expect allen weisselberg himself to be a witness to potentially walk the jury through what his notes meant and explain this document that is otherwise a fall off your chair moment ? >> it is a good thing, since he's serving time for perjury. so, neither side wants him as a witness. so, it is very good for the prosecution because they can just have the notes and obviously donald trump doesn't want a purge of her testifying on his behalf. that is a good thing. i agree with andrew. this is the corroboration. when you talk about michael cohen and his baggage, this is

where you have corroboration of his statements. so, there is no way the manhattan da office would have relied on michael cohen's testimony if they did not have corroborating documents, corroborating witnesses. >> our primetime recap of the only criminal trial in the history of a former american president, not to mention a perceptive presidential nominee, will continue right after the break with our all- star panel and legal expert here. we have much more to come. stay with us. us. love you. have a good day, behave yourself.

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primetime recap of the criminal court proceedings today after former president donald trump. the historic first ever criminal trial of a former president. the first ever criminal trial of a major party presidential nominee. question from the prosecutor. so, as ceo and president and chairman did you have the final say over publishing decisions including which stories would get published and which stories would not get published. >> answer from david pecker, former ceo of american media, yes, i had the final say. on the celebrity side of the magazine industry, at least on the tabloid side, we used checkbook journalism and we pay for stories. so i give a number to the editors that they could not

spend more than $10,000 to investigate or produce or publish a story. so anything over $10,000 that they would spend on a story, that would have to be vetted and brought up to me if they were going to spend more for approval. question, prosecutor. in addition to having approve expenditures did you also have final kind of editorial say, in other words, the ability to determine that a particular story was not going to be run or a particular story was going to be run? answer, david pecker. being in the publishing industry for 40 years i realized early in my career that the only thing that was important is the cover of a magazine. so when the editors produce a story or prepare the cover, we would have a meeting and they would present the story, what the concept was, what the cost would be. question, prosecutor. if the story involved for lack of a better way to say it, a big story or a famous person, did you have the final say on whether or not to publish the story. answer, david pecker. yes, i did. the first witness in the

criminal trial of former president donald trump today was david pecker, the former ceo of american media inc. ami, the company that used to own the national enquirer. two salient points here about that testimony from david pecker. he's only on the stand for like half an hour today, but we get all of this salient stuff for the prosecution's case. first of all, there's what he said about what counts as a normal amount of money for the kind of checkbook journalism that he says his company does. anything over $10,000, that would be unusual. that would be sort of out of bounds. that would have to get personal approval from him as the chairman, president, and ceo of not just one of these publications but the entire company with dozens of publications. ten grand was the ceiling. beyond that, it had to go personally through him. but in this case, prosecutors say they will present evidence that ami was doing something in a whole other league when it came to what they were doing for

trump. for example, before even investigating a trump property doorman's claim about trump's supposedly fathering a secret child with a housekeeper, they paid that man $30,000. they paid the man making the claim $30,000 to make him be quiet about it before they even investigated whether it might be true. triple what is their normal limit for having to go to the ceo. also the claim about the affair with trump from former playboy playmate karen mcdougal. they paid her $150,000. which was 15 times their limit for going to the ceo and appears to have been way beyond what they were paying anybody else for anything. prosecutor matthew colangelo, quote, after consulting with cohen, pecker directed his editor in chief to negotiate an agreement to pay $30,000 to the doorman to buy exclusive rights to that story.

the evidence will show that pecker was not acting as a publisher, he was acting as a coconspirator, the evidence will show this was a highly unusual deal, even for tabloid journalism. it was a lot more money than they would usually pay to a source. they bought the doorman's story without even fully investigating it. it was the first time david pecker had ever paid anyone about information about donald trump. pecker directed the deal take place because of the agreement he had reached and because he had promised trump he would use his media empire to help the defendant's campaign and they knew that public disclosure of the doorman's information would hurt that campaign. so what prosecuted laid out today and what the witness helped them prove today is that the practices described here in this alleged criminal conspiracy were not at all normal, not even for tabloid checkbook journalism that pays for stories. and even for american media specifically and the national

enquirer specifically, this is not their bag. this is not part of what they do as a magazine. this is part of what they do as an alleged criminal conspiracy with donald trump to illegally influence the election. so that's one. the second and final part about this david pecker testimony that is perhaps salient to the overall case here is the part where he says that the, quote, only thing that's important is the cover of a magazine. stepping back from just the legal fight here, if this was a criminal conspiracy to influence the election, how much influence are we talking about here? in terms of how much influence this alleged criminal conspiracy could have had on the election, well, how influential is the national enquirerenquirer repory has 150,000, 250,000 copies sold

nationwide in a week these days but the covers are the only things that matters. they have their covers in the face of everyone who shopped in a mainstream grocery store anywhere in america in all 50 states. the cover of the national enquirer per david pecker, the only thing that matters the cover of the magazine from the time of this alleged criminal conspiracy with trump, the covers that were in your face in every supermarket in the country week after week and for months on end looked like this. trump, why i am the only choice for president. the donald trump nobody knows. the babes and bucks. the real reason he hates obama and the clintons. this one has a special place in my heart. putin picks trump for president. or this one, how trump will win. or following, how trump will win the debate. also, hillary's nephew is in the klan. trump takes charge.

also, bill clinton is dying. and hillary is dying. and also, hillary is corrupt. in case that's not clear enough, it just says corrupt. also, hillary will never be president. and this was their election eve bombshell edition. just make sure you hit all the bases here. hillary corrupt, racist, criminal. before 2016, the national enquirer never before endorsed a presidential candidate. but this is what they did in 2016 when they did those covers. they were doing something very different with donald trump than they had ever done with any politician before. something that was in the face of every person who ever walked up to the little conveyer belt thing at a supermarket check-out line anywhere in america any time during the duration of the alleged conspiracy which was the duration of the 2016 campaign.

whether or not you picked up the magazine, let alone opened the cover, this propaganda which was the product of this allegedly illegal campaign scheme, was in the face of likely if not tens of millions of americans, perhaps more than 100 million americans. how many of us go to a grocery store? this was a strange out of character first time ever arrangement they made with this one candidate, with trump, that prosecutors today in their opening statement said was a criminal scheme to corrupt the 2016 presidential election. a criminal scheme hatched in a trump tower meeting just a few weeks after he announced his candidacy for president. a criminal scheme which ultimately landed him in criminal court today as the first ever u.s. president to be a defendant in a criminal trial. the cover-up of the alleged conspiracy was charged as a string of 34 felonies in new york state. joy reid joins us now. joy, my friend, there is not a

lawyer, not a lawyer. one of many things we share. >> yes, indeed. >> i feel like there's a way to look at what's happening in the courtroom that you need legal help with, you need legal expertise in how juries are likely to react to them, and then i also feel like there's the real deal look at it in terms of the logic and the case being made and we understand what sways people. >> you quoted, we also share a love of the wire. i'm going to goat marlo. you want it to be one way but it's the other way. the thing you just pointed out there, the checkbook journalism piece, normally if you pay for a salacious piece of news, you publish it. you put it on the cover. if you're the national enquirer acting as they normally would act, and you have got a doorman that says he knows about an illicit child of one of the most famous men in america who is running for president, you publish it, you don't not publish it. if you know the babes and bucks guy had an affair, a nine-month

affair with a playboy bunny, you publish it, you don't not publish it. earlier, you were talking about the things that stood out to you in the opening arguments. the thing that stood out to me that goes along with this is the part where they said, donald trump may seem larger than life, but he's just a man. he's a father and a husband -- chris is already laughing -- father and a husband and he's just like you. you know, he's just a guy. you know what's not normal and regular? the babes and bucks guy being on the cover of the enquirer talking about how he's with all the babes and has all the bucks. what also not normal is even being accused of having an illicit child and having that being a thing, or being accused of sleeping with a porn actress. here's the thing that is the biggest problem donald trump is going to have. this is not about 2020 trump. this is about 2015, 2016 trump who was running for office as apprentice trump, where the

babes and bucks were his brand. sleeping with a playboy bunny was his brand. the idea he would be with a porn actress was part of his brand. it's part of what made people like him. so the idea that somebody who was mr. babes and bucks on the cover of the enquirer was so afraid that melania, his third wife who was pregnant with his fifth child from three baby mamas would be so terrified that poor melania would be shocked and appalled that he might have been sleeping with playboy bunnies and porn actresses, that he was so fearful that she would be hurt, it would hurt her feelings and that he had to do a hush money to save her, nobody is going to believe that. nobody with any sense is going to believe it. >> then she would no longer feel bad as soon as the election was over. >> she got over it. >> she's over it. >> none of it makes sense. the problem for trump, i have to say that lawrence actually kind of stole my thing i was going to say. you can tell that his attorney,

mr. blanche, who i feel tremendous pity for at this point, was not doing the case he would do if he had the freedom to do this case his way. he comes in doing things that the lawyers who i had on my show earlier are unusual, my client is going to be called mr. president because he's owed that, my client is a tremendous businessman and handsome and exciting and wonderful. the things he's doing are things trump wanted him to do. this piece sounds like something he would normally do for a normal client. he's just a guy like you. you need to relate to him. donald trump ran for office not to be relatable but to be larger than life. >> alex, good to have you here. >> do you have a wire quote? >> you know what -- pressure. a quote from oshow that has many episodes. none of this is normal. no aspect of what we're witnessing is normal. number one, for all journalism students out there, checkbob journalism, not a thing. it's not a thing.

also, what is inside the magazine also matters. as someone who has done many stories published, very few of which have been on the cover, they matter. the strategy from trump's team seems to be to normalize outlandish things which is keeping in, you know, tandem with what donald trump has done to this country, which is to normalize the abhorrent and abnormal. i was really struck not only by this sort of the pecker of it all, sorry to have to keep saying it, but at one point, at one point -- sorry. >> we're like 6 years old. >> it's like, is she having an outbreak. >> day 25 of pecker. the arguing that ndas are a common practice that many wealthy people do, this is nothing abnormal. you may not have heard about them before, but it happens. this is a thing that is done. just because trump had a bunch of people signing ndas doesn't

mean there's anything suspect about that. catch and kill, it happens all the time. this sort of thing happens all the time. this is from todd blanche's mouth to theiary. and then my favorite, there is nothing wrong with trying to influence an election. it's called democracy. that is not how the world works, todd blanche. that is maybe the argument they're going to use because time and time again, telling the american public over and over again, there's nothing to see here, i mean, look, he had impeachments one and two. he didn't get convicted. i think that they believe if you just keep telling people this is just how it works, maybe they can get off, they can get away with it. the difference between then and now is this is a criminal trial, and you're held to a different standard. i was flabbergasted that this is the best they could come up with when faced with a lot of material from the prosecution. >> i also think what's happening here, too, is you're seeing that

what's also not normal is somebody like ami and david pecker and dylan howard having to get immunity, because if it's okay to do all of this in journalism, why would you need immunity from prosecution? why would michael cohen go to prison? right? if all of this is normal and all of this is totally kosher, i guess it's passover, then there shouldn't be anything wrong with this. and he shouldn't be -- donald trump shouldn't be prosecuted. so that just kind of shows how donald trump has turned normal or abnormal into normal. he's normalized it. >> on the point of the kind of journalism that ami does, i mean, today when david pecker was on the stand, he's the one who volunteered the phrase checkbook journalism. he's describing this of his own accord. we pay for sources. national enquirer has no shame about this, ami has no shame about this. this is what they do. they do sometimes -- they do

sometimes with people other than donald trump find out negative information about a person and then decide not to run it. why do they do that? because they want to have that person consent to be on their magazine cover for other reasons. they have done this about cosby, bill cosby. a bunch of bad information about him. they did not run it in exchange for cosby doing exclusives with them. they had a bunch of bad information on arnold schwarzenegger. there's claims in "the new york times" that i had not seen before this weekend that they had done the same thing with tiger woods. they wanted tiger woods to do things. he sold magazines so they held the information they had on him. so they have done this vague pattern, this big scale pattern with other people. the difference is when they did it with donald trump, they only did it when it came to the election. prosecutors said today in their opening statement they had never before paid any for information related to donald trump. when it came to keeping donald

trump on the good side, what that meant, what that keeping trump happy, what were they paying to make all these stories go away for? it wasn't to get donald trump exclusives in their magazine. it was to help him win the election. that's when it became a crime. that's why ami had to get limited immunity. that's why michael cohen had to go to prison. they weren't trying to just keep him happy like tiger woods and cosby. >> because there's also a different regulatory structure that guides american elections. and the reason, i mean, it is strange at one level because like the covers you showed, that is to the point about influencing elections, called democracy, you could have your best homey running a magazine and he puts you on the cover every day, that is america. that is perfectly fine. and that's been happening since the founders. it's the fact that this was explustally a campaign

undertaken that was designed -- that couldn't be disclosed along the lines as campaign expenditures are regulated that turned into a crime. where the rubber hits the road, if it weren't that they could have just written the reimbursement check. right? >> it would have been clean. >> it would have been clean, but again, then it would have been a campaign expense so the point is when they get down to the nitty-gritty of who's paying this for what reason, they have to lie in a legal way about it because they have run afoul of it. i will say one thing that i still don't quite get. what was pecker -- like, i just don't -- he's just that loyal of a dude? he loves donald trump that much? he's going to have access to the president of the united states. >> trump sells papers. i mean, this is really -- >> an extraordinary amount. >> so the defense counsel today, one of the stranger things that he said in his opening argument

today was watch david pecker's testimony very carefully. david pecker is not his witness. he said david pecker may not say what these prosecutors are telling you he's going to say. because david pecker, he's implying, is going to testify likely tomorrow, you know, maybe later in the week, david pecker is likely going to testify that the reason he was motivated to do this is because he wanted to keep donald trump happy, wanted to keep donald trump happy because he wanted to keep donald trump doing things with their papers and publics because he sold and was good for them. the problem is that's okay if the way you're trying to keep donald trump happy is just doing the normal checkbook journalism you do. if the way you're trying to keep him happy is by doing things to affect the campaign, then that whole regulatory structure you're talking about is implicated. >> you can't get through any of this without answering the question, why did michael cohen go to jail inthey're trying to spend a lot of time impeaching him, but he was prosecuted by the trump era justice department, by the southern district of new york under the

trump regime. it was during when trump was president. what did he do wrong? you say he's going to be impeached because he's a criminal. when did he become a criminal? he never committed crimes before 2015, 2016. he gets a campaign email. he suddenly has a campaign email. why does he have a trump campaign email. then he goes -- he then gets prosecuted and donald trump is an unindicted coconspirator in that. what did he do that was criminal? he took out a loan because he didn't have the money to himself be a rich pal of trump and give $130,000 to a woman he hadn't slept with, so he didn't have the money. he had to get a loan. he lied to the mortgage company to get the loan because he didn't qualify for the loan. he then takes out a loan and has to commit mortgage fraud to get the money. gives the money, not even to donald trump, gives it to a third party he never slept with and doesn't necessarily know. why would he do that? the problem is everything they want to say about michael cohen

is only true about michael cohen because of donald trump. because he doesn't benefit from it and because of the thing he was working for that wasn't even his job. he was a fixer who was helping with the election. >> can i ask one quick question, a legal one that floats around? i don't have the answer to this question. i keep wondering, was there a way to lawyer this properly? was there a way to say we have a problem here, we're all assembled, we're in the command room. we have these women making these accusations. we don't want this to get out. how do we lawyer this so we're not committing a crime? they weren't thinking that way because that's not the way they think. there's just these people who love to roll around in dirt, like just like they love it. they love to be like it's all dirty and it's like, oh, catch and kill. i'm writing you a check. all this nonsense. but i'm saying, what would the super professionally lawyered version of this look like and could you lawyer it successfully such that you were not committing a crime?

>> there is no super professional version of this. you don't create llcs to funnel money unless you're funneling money. lawyers just don't do that. that's a risk for donald trump because you have two lawyers on this jury, which i know some people think is a liability for the prosecution, but these are corporate lawyers, none of whom are creating llcs in other states to hide ownership to funnel money on behalf of a presidential candidate. that's not how normal lawyers operate. so there really is no clean way of doing this. the only way would have been a straight reimbursement. >> push that. >> ndas happen all the time. i don't disagree with donald trump's theory on that. they happen all the time, but you're not doing it for that purpose. you're not doing it with the explicit purpose of a campaign influence. >> the reason these come up against each other is because the regulatory edifice over a campaign requires a level of disclosure that lets the cat out

of the bag, although again, if you had a super pac who bought it, again, things have gotten so screwed up in that world, but the point being if you had written the check, i guess what i was watching today, i was like why didn't they just, when they were going through the math, i had the thought, this guy is cheap, why didn't they just don't report it as income and maybe no one will notice? >> i think there's ways to do it that are less getting yelled at by idris elba in the wire. there's ways to do it, but i think the nut of it is there's a criminal intention here. >> that's what i'm getting at. >> you can make it prettier and less sordid and less dirty. you're still committing a crime. >> because you're running for president and can't do that. >> the fact they didn't do this for trump when he wasn't running for president is the giveaway. much more to come. our primetime recap of the trial today in new york. we'll be right back.

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welcome back to our primetime recap of the criminal court proceedings against former president donald trump today. trump's lawyer, defense counsel todd blanche was in the middle of his opening statements today when something unusual happened.

todd blanche, trump defense counsel, quote, michael cohen paying stormy daniels or stephanie clifford $130,000 in exchange for her agreeing to not publicly spread false, false claims about president trump is not illegal. i'm going to say that again. entering into a nondisclosure agreement, prosecutor. objection. judge, sustained. mr. blanche. entering into a nondiscloser agreement is perfectly legal. prosecutor, objection. the judge, overruled. mr. blanche then continued on for a moment, then it happened again. todd blanche, when ms. daniels threatened to go public with her false claim of a sexual encounter with mr. trump in 2008, it was close to the election and it was almost an attempt by ms. clifford, ms. daniels to extort president trump, prosecutor, objection. judge, sustained. blanche then tries to keep going, but then a moment later,

mr. blanche, again, entering into an agreement with another individual, you'll their this agreement was negotiated by lawyers. prosecutor, objection. now, at this point, judge merchan does not even rule on the objection. he doesn't say sustained, doesn't say overruled. he instead calls lawyers from both sides up to the bench. please approach. the lawyers and the judge then confer and then the judge rules. judge, the objection is sustained. so then mr. branch, trump's lawyer, moves on to another topic. he makes it three further pages into the transcript when the whole thing starts over again. it's over the mention of michael cohen. quote, separately from his obsession with president trump and his obsession to get president trump on multiple occasions, michael cohen has testified under oath and lied. prosecutor, objection. judge, sustains. blanche, he has walked into a courtroom very near here, raised his right hand and wore to tell the truth and now he will tell you i expect that he was lying.

proscurement, objection. judge, sustained. then for a second time, the judge calls up the lawyers for both sides to the bench. counsel, please approach. and a second time he upholds the objection. judge merchan, the objection is sustained. now, i was in the court when this string of objections happened in the middle of trump's team's opening statements. both sides getting repeatedly hauled up before the judge. the lawyer having to restart what he was saying, pick back up. to me, as a lay person, it seemed dramatic and strange. but i want to ask our lawyers here. how rare is it for objections to be made during opening statements? how rare is it for the judge to interrupt opening statements with multiple directions to the lawyers including the one making the opening statement that they have to come up to the bench and talk to the judge? why were these objections made? what does it tell us for the trial and the defense trump's lawyer is trying to make. joining us is lisa reuben who

was at the courthouse in the overflow room. part of your sacrifice today was allowing me to be in the courtroom in a seat you might have otherwise had your butt in. >> it was not a sacrifice. >> i'm very grateful and i hereby bequeath your seat back to you. >> thank you, i think. >> you in some ways in the overflow room may have had a slightly better view of this sitting in the back of the courtroom watching it down the aisle. what was happening and how weird was it? >> it was weird, not just because there was one objection but because of how many there were relative to the brevity of todd blanche's opening statement. todd blanche was an experienced prosecutor in the southern district of new york. what he is not is an experienced defense lawyer. we learned today from new york magazine something that confirms something i suspected which is todd blanche has tried exactly one trial as defense counsel in the last decade. and on a fairly narrow issue. and if you were just in that courtroom, you probably would have expected as much because his flow was interrupted so many times by these frequent

objections and the side bars. now, that having been said, i think a number of the things he did today were perfectly intentional because while they were objected to and the objections were sustained, he still planted the seeds of doubt in the jurors' minds. in particular, for example, when he said that stormy daniels made donald trump a victim of extortion, that was immediately objected to and sustained because that among other things is a legal conclusion. there was no prosecution, for example, of stormy daniels for extorting donald trump. >> he would have known in advance the judge was not going to allow him to get away with saying that. >> i think that's probably right. there were other objections where he definitely knew and the place where he definitely knew is when he talked about the diet advice of counsel defense, where he essentially said trump believed these nondisclosure agreements were totally kosher because he had attorneyed negotiating them for him. that was an issue that has already been litigated as part of the party's motions which are the advanced arguments about what evidence can and can't come

in. todd blanche knew that was not going to be an argument allowed because he was trying to use the attorney/client privilege as a sword and shield, essentially saying my client relied on advance, but we're not going to tell you what that advice is. just like what the judge did in the sam bankman-fried case, i'm not going to allow your client do that. yet, that's where blanche still went. >> i'm going to give an instruction now that nobody knows what is coming. i would like to talk to catherine christian if i could. she's on the oat side of the room and lots of cameras have to move to make this possible. you have experience in the new york district attorney's office. what lisa is describing here about mr. blanche's relative inexperience doing this kind of lawyering and this kind of a case is one piece of perspective here. another piece of perspective here is what's normal in a new

york d.a. criminal proceeding like this when these interruptions, these objections happen during the opening statements here from the defense. how did that strike you? >> it's not unusual. andrew and i will probably have different experience. new york state court is not as dainty as federal court. so it's not shocking. and defense attorneys, some of them pride themselves on stepping on the line. so, you know, i could objection when i was a prosecutor because they were stepping on the line. as lisa said, oopsie, the jury heard what they said, so it's in their head. i can't say it happens all the time, but it's not shocking. i rarely objected as a prosecutor because i didn't want the jury to think i was trying to hide something or i was afraid. here i would have objected because he was clearly saying things he shouldn't have and the judge already ruled against. it's not shocking, at least not in the world of new york county. >> let me ask you about something katie said earlier

where she said in the minds of the jury, mr. blanche might have not done himself favors with all those statements being objected to today and all those interruptions because the jury might have thought even if the seeds were planted in their minds by things he wasn't supposed to say that he nevertheless had them here, they would think he was doing something wrong by being essentially sort of mini sanctioned by the judge in that way and interrupted in his flow. >> no, and the judge instructs the jury about objections and not to take them against the defense attorney or the prosecutor. i have heard acquitting juries talk about how they liked how that defense attorney really fought for their client. so i don't think you could read into, oh, it's sustained. theiary is going to think very bad. i think as lisa just said, there was a tactic. he knew that these were objectional things he was saying, and they were objected to, but you can't unring the bell is what you usually say.

and prosecutors cannot appeal an acquittal. >> much more of our special primetime recap of today's opening statements in the new york trial against donald trump when we come back. stay with us. [coughing] copd hasn't been pretty. it's tough to breathe and tough to keep wondering if this is as good as it gets. but trelegy has shown me that there's still beauty and breath to be had. because with three medicines in one inhaler, trelegy keeps my airways open and prevents future flare-ups. and with one dose a day, trelegy improves lung function so i can breathe more freely all day and night.

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so under an order imposed by the court in this criminal case,

donald trump is not allowed to make or direct others to make public statements about known or reasonably foreseeable witnesses concerning their potential participation in the investigation or in this criminal proceeding. he's not allowed to do that. prosecution is now arguing that trump has done that a lot. there will be a hearing tomorrow morning add 9:30 eastern before the jurors come into the courtroom. prosecutors are going to ask the judge to find that former president trump willfully violated the gag order by attacking well known potential witnesses including stormy daniels and michael cohen, attacking their credibility on up to ten separate occasions. if the judge finds trump in criminal contempt of court on these matters trump could be fined up to $1,000 each for each violation. he could possibly be sentenced to a maximum of 30 days in jail although prosecutors are not asking for that yet. i mean, tonight, trump sent

around a fund-raising email called my farewell message making it sound like he's definitely going to jail. i already meant to ask our legal experts about it, but we just cued up new sound from donald trump today from an interview on a conservative network called real america's voice. here it is, donald trump talking about the jury in his trial. >> that jury was picked so fast, 95% democrats. the area is mostly all democrats. you think of it as just a purely democrat area. it's a very unfair situation that i can tell you. >> that jury, 95% democrats. again, the last item in the gag order forebids trump from making or directing others to make public statements about any perspective juror or any juror in this criminal proceeding. andrew weissmann, still with us here tonight. the gag order has been the

discussion that i feel like we have had around the edges of this case a lot because it's the way that trump has tried to kind of shape the environment around this case. it's going to be in the courtroom front and center tomorrow morning at 9:30. what do you expect judge merchan is going to do inwhat are you going to be watching for? >> you have donald trump clearly goading the judge. the fact that he's doing something that appears by all accounts to be a direct violation of the order as late as tonight in advance of a 9:30 hearing on violations with respect to witnesses and a violation with respect to jurors, both of which are things that a judge is going to care tremendously about. you know, i think obviously he's going to hear from the defense and the betting is that he's going to certainly say that there was a violation, and he could impose the fine that is obviously negligible and saber

rattle about what's next. this is one where what i would say if i were -- like if he were sitting right here, i would say leave aside politics, leave aside what he's goading somebody to do. what would you do for any other defendant? we have seen the legal system bend over sort of so far to accommodate donald trump. he is not being treated worse. he's being treated so much better, whether you're talking about doj, whether you're talking about all of the criminal cases. and this is one where he wouldn't have to impose 30 days in jail. but he can really do like a child, give him a time out. he can step back and be kept in the pens, in the courthouse. i think this is clearly like a child testing what will happen. and it's at the very outset of the case, if there isn't a firm

hand right now and the rule of law isn't imposed it's a terrible message in terms of how the trial is going to go forward because he's going to continue doing this. if there are jurors he doesn't like, he could attack them. if he's going to seek a mistrial by his antics that's something he could try. the court who is extremely experiences is going to have to be really careful about what exactly is the sanction he's going to impose tomorrow. >> how will the judge decide or how will the hearing on this go? again, this is going to be way that court starts tomorrow. is he going to ask -- is he going to rule or ask defense counsel and the prosecutors to make arguments in front of him? is he going to have a witness talk? >> he could ask both sides to state their position. he could see if there is a dispute of facts. you could actually have a hearing on this. but there may not be a dispute of facts. the facts seem so clear unless donald trump is going to say somebody else took over my

account. roger stone tried that when he was in violation. he actually took the witness stand and said, i didn't do that. then he later sort of recanted and said, okay, i did do it. that was when he posted the judge's picture with cross hairs next to her head. and so there can be a hearing but it may not be necessary just given the volume of allegations here. there's now, i think, up to 11 allegations that are going to be before the judge. but ultimately, it would be the state's burden to go forward. >> all right, we will be back with more on the criminal trial of former president trump, opening statements started today. again, tomorrow's proceedings will start, 9:30 in the morning, with a hearing on whether or not trump should be held in contempt for violations of the gag order that is supposed to restrict his ability essentially to menace witnesses or jurors in this case. we'll be right back after the break.

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there weren't any. i -- there were enough when i saw them to fit into a sedan, a small sedan. i saw four and one of them i think might have been a reporter. stephanie ruhle has joined us. the lack of trump -- pro-trump uprising around this, president trump today was trying to say it's because republicans are being prevented from going to that part of lower manhattan. what do you make of how this is happening in new york? >> that's the story for me, the arc of donald trump in new york. the boy who grew up in queens who dreamt of being king of new york. think about the 1980s and every tabloid with donald trump in a limousine, trump tower, right in the middle of fifth avenue. now here he is, a criminal defendant, an old man sitting there slumped over, and even this idea he's got these scores of fans, and yeah, they might not live in lower manhattan but there must be 2 million in the

tristate area in staten island, in new jersey, in long island. such a few number of people in the court outside court, protesting on his behalf today. >> almost really nobody. >> who wasn't inside court with him? a single member of his family. the argument that he was protecting his family, that's why this whole thing happened. he's a familyman. not a son, not a daughter, wife, cousin, uncle. no one. the whole thing is stunning. >> our friend susanne craig, "new york times" investigative reporter, was at the courthouse today in the overflow room. it's good to see you. i know you have been there all of last week. you were there today. what was different about today now that opening statements have started? do you feel like you have a better sense of where the case is going? >> we definitely do. i thought for me it was really exciting. kind of a reporter to the bone, and i was really tantalized by just these references we got today to text messages and emails that we hadn't heard of before. you have to imagine there's more

coming on that front. we had one where dylan howard who was the top editor of the national enquirer goes to california to meet karen mcdougal and he's texting information about her back and forth with other people. we're going to be able to see some of that. and the other thing i'm really wondering, david pecker is going to be up tomorrow. are we going to get -- i know we will, but how much more information are we going to get about the meeting that david pecker had with michael cohen and donald trump? what was the arrangement? it was more than just those three payments that we know about. there were so many more covers. just how did that all happen? i think that's going to be really interesting to see how david pecker's testimony unfolds tomorrow. >> what did you make of pecker's affect as a witness? i saw his soft spoken and almost elliptical as he spoke. >> from the overflow room, he

seemed kind of approachable and almost sort of like a grandfatherly friendly figure. it was interesting. lockland cartwright we had on earlier was talking about him and he used to work with him and just saw him as a much younger man and said he was slower, he was forgetful. he came across a little differently. i always sort of find him to be approachable, so i think people got a different view depending on what room they were in. i am wondering how he's going to play with the jury. he's going to be up, i would imagine, for a few days. i think he has a lot to say. >> this is a donald trump criminal trial, but there's a lot about the national enquirer and ami that everybody is going to learn including the jurors and a lot is going to come from him, including tomorrow morning. susanne craig, thank you. our coverage of trump's very busy legal day, legal week continues in just a moment. stay with us.

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