posed<\/a> a provocative question: \u201cWILL HE BE IN PRISON\u201d by the time the first debate takes place on June 27?<\/p>\nTrump\u2019s hush money cover-up trial will surely be over by then, but, according to CNN\u2019s chief legal correspondent, talk of jail time drastically overstates the stakes. It\u2019s \u201chighly unlikely he\u2019s gonna go to prison. This is a first-time offender,\u201d Paula Reid<\/strong> explained on the latest episode of the Vanity Fair<\/em> podcast Inside the Hive.<\/em> \u201cYes, this is a felony charge, but it\u2019s falsifying business records. It\u2019s highly unlikely that he would be sentenced to any prison time, and even if he was, that is going to be litigated and appealed for quite some time. So anyone saying that, that\u2019s just hyperbole.\u201d<\/p>\nReid calls herself a \u201crecovering lawyer\u201d and specializes in legal-world reality checks, so here\u2019s another one: A Trump conviction is anything but a certainty. \u201cThis case very much rests on the testimony of Michael Cohen,<\/strong> a flawed witness, to put it mildly,\u201d she said. \u201cAnd it\u2019s just not clear what the jury is going to make of him.\u201d<\/p>\n\u201cIf jurors, even one juror, [have] reasonable doubt about Michael Cohen,\u201d Reid added, \u201cthis should not be a conviction, and I think it is possible that you could get a hung jury here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Reid is based in Washington but has relocated to New York for the duration of the trial. She has been a near-24\/7 presence on CNN when court has been in session. It \u201ctakes a village,\u201d she said, describing the challenges of covering a trial without the benefit of cameras in the courtroom. CNN\u2019s newsroom ingests a \u201cstream of text messages\u201d from reporters who are in court and summarizing the testimony, she explained. Then it\u2019s up to Reid and her on-air colleagues to put it in context.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s where her legal background helps. Reid passed the bar exam twice and worked in a prosecutor\u2019s office in Chester County, Pennsylvania, before pivoting into journalism. Legal fluency helps when \u201ctalking to lawyers, talking to sources, asking good questions,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n
Reid has been covering Trump legal controversies for the better part of a decade, so she is intimately familiar with the \u201cinfighting\u201d and power struggles among past Trump lawyers. \u201cI think the hardest thing with the Trump legal team is there is so much turnover,\u201d Reid explained, but Trump\u2019s current team for the New York hush money trial \u201cis probably the most solid one\u201d he has had overall.<\/p>\n
Reid is noticeably well sourced in Trump\u2019s legal orbit. She said his defense lawyers, Todd Blanche<\/strong> and Susan Necheles,<\/strong> are confident about their chances, in part because \u201cit\u2019s a weird case,\u201d with a felony charge for falsifying business records. \u201cA paperwork case for a man who doesn\u2019t leave a paperwork trail is challenging,\u201d she noted. Therefore, the prosecution\u2019s success rests largely on Cohen, who underwent cross-examination on Thursday.<\/p>\nThe parade of witnesses has progressed largely as expected for the past few weeks. Given the climate of intimidation that Trump is known for, \u201cthe biggest surprise, to me, is that we haven\u2019t lost more jurors,\u201d Reid said. \u201cIt\u2019s an incredibly stressful thing to be caught in his crosshairs\u2026So I\u2019m surprised. Maybe it just speaks to the toughness of Manhattanites.\u201d<\/p>\n
After watching the jurors remain attentive during \u201cdeadly boring\u201d accountant testimony, Reid concluded that they \u201chave accepted the risk\u201d and \u201cunderstand the gravity of what they have been tasked with.\u201d She added, \u201cI\u2019m pretty sure you could stop any subway car in Manhattan, take the first 18 people\u2014because there\u2019s 12 jurors and then you have the alternates\u2014this would be them. It\u2019s very diverse and just really looks like it represents any dozen or so people on the streets of Manhattan.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n
Source link <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"When former president Donald Trump struck a two-debate deal with President Joe Biden on Wednesday, the Drudge Report posed a provocative question: \u201cWILL HE BE IN PRISON\u201d by the time the first debate takes place on June 27? Trump\u2019s hush money cover-up trial will surely be over by then, but, according to CNN\u2019s chief legal […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":97899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[1649,54,642,1157,7957,2227],"class_list":{"0":"post-97898","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-celebrity","8":"tag-cnn","9":"tag-donald-trump","10":"tag-inside-the-hive","11":"tag-michael-cohen","12":"tag-podcast","13":"tag-podcasts"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97898","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=97898"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/97898\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/97899"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=97898"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=97898"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/entertainment.runfyers.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=97898"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}