elbows are impossible to lick. i meant your own elbows. you don t settle for bad internet. that s why you have the xfinity 10g network, with ultra-low lag for better streaming. wish you would have been more specific about your elbow. only from xfinity. good afternoon. i m chris jansing reporting live from msnbc headquarters in new york city, and it is suddenly another wild day inside a manhattan courtroom. breaking news as we come on the air, former president trump addressing the court right now, part of the final chapter in the civil fraud trial that could bring down the empire that made donald trump a mogul and then arguably president. today there were dramatic closing arguments as the former president tried to argue his way out of a devastating blow to his business. lawyers putting their final mark on what has been an intense and important 11 weeks. i want to bring in new york times investigative reporter suzanne craig. also with us new york times chief white house c
Mexicans would pay for it, to use the money to take land away from farmers and ranchers on the border of the United States. How can any conservative support this guy . Senator, the definition of conservative has changed so fast in our lifetime its unbelievable. We need a dictionary to keep up with it. Senator michael bennet, democrat from colorado. Thank you, sir. Stay safe on the trail. Thats all we have for tonight. Well be back tomorrow with more meet the press daily. Ari melber is picking it up. Good evening to you. We begin here with Breaking News rocking washington. Moment of truth. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says that is what faces the nation tonight. Right now as she stepped out and made this announcement just within the last hour. Im announcing the House Of Representatives moving forward with an official Impeachment Inquiry. Im directing our six committees to proceed with their
investigations under that umbrella of Impeachment Inquiry. The president must be held accountable. N
the steps. he s making the case to the broader public. he s making the case to his base days away from the iowa caucus, that he is a victim, that he is the persecuted candidate. therefore, they should not give credit to the ruling that this judge will make and has already made. the judge already determined that president trump committed fraud with these valuations of his property, and now the only question is how much he ll pay for that. donald trump is trying to explain that to the audience of voters who may only be paying attention now as the iowa caucuses near on monday and the new hampshire primary follows a week after that. charles, both by his lawyers during their can closing statements and now by donald trump, they are making an argument that fraud wasn t committed when, in fact, that has already been decided. so what is their strategy by doing that? bad lawyering. and i really know that may sound very simple, but at the end of the day, as you said, this is
The Atlantic
The former president’s lawyers were bad but that was all too typical.
February 13, 2021
Jabin Botsford / AFP / Getty
If future generations of law professors want to teach a class in what never to do, the belligerent and self-indulgent performance of Michael van der Veen, one of Donald Trump’s impeachment lawyers, could provide a lot of the video content. Deep into his defense of the former president today, van der Veen broke into a highly personal complaint. More than 140 law professors including President Ronald Reagan’s solicitor general and a co-founder of the conservative Federalist Society had signed a letter condemning the Trump team’s arguments as “frivolous.” This letter badly hurt van der Veen’s feelings. The letter, he said, represented, a “direct threat to my law license, my career, and my family’s financial well-being.”
it was a purely political document that had virtually no legal grounding. to take one example. they do site a single case with the idea that due process is required during an impeachment. from the district of of columbia involving the impeachment of judge hastings. what they don t tell you is that case was vacated and it was vacated on the precise ground that the courts decided they had no basis of imposing a due process requirement on the house of representatives. so it s smoke and mirrors, bad lawyering. i m a defense lawyer and often you do what your client wants, even though you know it s a bad idea. you let him testify even though he shouldn t. we call that client service because they get to make that decision. this was nothing more than client service to the president of of the united states. sending out an angry tweet in