Judge Repeats Ruling: Bribing A Porn Star Is Not Official Act

LAWRENCE O’DONNELL: Andrew, let’s begin with Judge Hellerstein today, the federal judge in New York, who’s the first one to actually issue a ruling based on the Supreme Court’s immunity decision, and he said has absolutely nothing to do with Stormy Daniels.

ANDREW WEISSMANN: Yeah, well, a judge who I used to appear in front of used to say, I have two words for you, de-nied.

And this was a repeat motion, as you pointed out, which was there was a motion already that Donald Trump made saying that this case, the New York criminal case should have been, should be tried in federal court, removing it from state courts, federal court that was denied by Judge Hellerstein.

So this was another Hail Mary. And I think what you really are seeing here is judges who really take their oaths of office seriously for equal justice and are having none of the shenanigans of Donald Trump.

It’s like, it doesn’t matter if you’re rich, white, powerful, you get equal justice, not more, not less. And this was a frivolous argument and it was denied in a cursory fashion.

And it sends it back to Judge Merchan, as you said, in front of Judge Merchan, there is the issue that is pending of whether the certain types of evidence that Supreme Court now has said you can’t use, whether that sort of severely or sufficiently undermines the trial, so he would get a new trial.

And assuming that’s denied, there’s the second issue, which is Donald Trump has a motion pending before Judge Merchan to put off the September 18th sentencing date.

So those are the two things that are before Judge Merchan that we’re waiting on.

O’DONNELL: And in Washington and Judge Chutkan’s courtroom on Thursday, what are we going to see? Well, we’re not going to see anything, but we will have it reported.

WEISSMANN: Exactly. So we’re back in front of an experienced judge, very much like Judge Hellerstein and like Judge Merchan. It’s not somebody who’s inexperienced like Judge Cannon. There’s no sense of bias one way or the other.

What you have is Jack Smith saying, ‘we’re ready to go. We can file our brief NOW!’ I mean, they literally said, ‘we have the brief, we’re ready.’ So we’re ready to sort of move along. So you tell us to proceed, we will go forward.

Donald Trump, as you can expect, it’s a little like Scheherazade.

He’s like, you know what, let me just keep on filing additional briefs and let’s just do this seriatim one after another.

He doesn’t want to see any filings by Jack Smith before the election.

I mean, the schedule he proposed is basically, you can file after the election and even after the inauguration.

So he really wants to see things put off. I don’t think that is where Judge Chutkan is going to go.

Remember, she has been waiting eight months for this case to be sent back to her. And this is a routine scheduling matter.

And the Supreme Court has actually said she needs to deal with this.

So I see her setting that schedule. And what Jack Smith proposed, which is he’s got a brief, I could see her saying, yeah, file it and then giving Donald Trump time to file his response.

And then if it’s necessary to have a hearing after she sees the papers, she can schedule it. But I think she’s going to want to see the briefs from both sides, sort of standard procedure in any case. And I think that’s what she’ll do here, treating Donald Trump like any litigant.