you said, now show republican voters, i m steady. i m not going to make you cringe every time i get in front of a microphone. you re not going to have to worry about what i m going to say. i ll actually get things done. look at all the things i m getting done in the state of florida. donald trump passed absolutely nothing other than a huge tax cut for billionaires in d.c. you know what? most importantly, i know how to win. don t you think that s the differentiation between trump he needs to make? well, look, i also think if you re ron desantis team, you re looking at mike pence. you re seeing mike pence dropping in favorability and also going up in unfavorability. what s that connected to? is it connected to the fact that he finally sort of spoke out against trump? is it connected to the fact that he also hasn t criticized trump? yes, if this were a sane republican primary, my advice and your advice would be, i think, exactly it, which is find your lane to be the steady point that h
judge howell was not ruling on whether trump was guilty of a crime but was making a decision on whether his attorney could be compelled to testify. the judge ruled in favor of applying the so-called crime fraud exception, meaning trump attorney evan corcoran can t claim attorney-client privilege to avoid testifying. the judge ruled in favor of ordering corcoran to testify before the grand jury, convened by special counsel jack smith, who is currently investigating the former president s handling of the classified documents after leaving office. now, at the same time, the washington post reports a federal appeals court ruled yesterday to uphold judge howell s ruling, ordering corcoran to turn over notes, transcripts and other evidence to prosecutors and to return to the grand jury to answer prosecutors questions more fully. that could even be tapes. yeah. yikes.
you started sort of a turf battle here. i expect tridents to come out by the time kornacki is on. are you kidding me? waiting for him at the door. good luck, steve. as usual, it s a few minutes past the top of the hour. second hour of morning joe. jonathan lemire and michael steele are still with us. we can talk about the classified documents but which is the bigger story. it is. willie, what do grifting thing, where donald trump knew he wasn t going to be charged tuesday but went ahead and did it as a fundraising grift? he s raised, well, $1.5 million. three days. by the way, we re going, okay, why does he want to be handcuffed? he wants to be handcuffed because that means more money. again, i keep talking about the jim and tammy faye bakker approach to politics.
than donald trump? you better have a slightly better answer on russia, first of all, because that wasn t super sophisticated in a lot of ways. are you going to be the guy who is the culture war hero? doesn t help you in the general election, but maybe it helps in the primary. right now, he is flailing in a lot of directions. my advice would be to find the one lane, the one place, and continue to drive that home. joe, it s been interesting. we ve been talking. you ve been looking a lot about the murdoch empire boosting ron desantis against donald trump. there is a four-page spread this morning summarizing piers morgan s interview in the new york including this headline, ron s heart is with the people of ukraine. if you turn the page, it s a two-page spread about how he s gotten fit and slim. ron desantis apparently lost a bunch of weight as he prepares to run for president. he is looking fit for duty, says the new york post. sounds like 2000, jogging on the beach, great. ther
donald trump put his lawyer in jeopardy, potentially by lying to his lawyer about certain facts. because of that, you now have this exception coming into play. it generally goes into, you know, behaviors of the lawyer, behaviors of the client, and how that affects that whole idea of attorney-client privilege. and doing things that break that privilege. in this case, there was clearly evidence there that donald trump probably, looking at it from that standpoint, said something, told his lawyer, gave his lawyer information, put his lawyer in the situation where that privilege claim could not be upheld. now, we ll get to see at some point what that was. but it is a significant turn in this case. it really says a lot about how, in many respects, and we have seen this before, joe, donald