donald trump with the baseball bad next to a picture of alvin bragg. he said if i see that tone again, we could have a problem. for donald trump, we know what donald trump is like. he s going to be very inc incendiary. he s an announced candidate for next year. you can expect the donald trump that we ve seen till now. the judge understands that. neil: yeah, i can see that. ashley webster outside mar-a-largo. across the way in palm beach, florida. the former president s lawyers did speak after this hearing in lower manhattan. let s take a look at that. what about the change of venue? it s premature. why is he talking about that? why is he trying we re three lawyers here trying to fight this case. we re not social media consultants or social media
to do so would have been admitting a crime. mr. trump said he was paying mr. cohen for fictitious legal services in 2017 to cover up actual crime committed the prior year. in order to get michael cohen his money back, they planned one last false statement. in order to complete this scheme, they planned to miss characterize the payments to mr. cohen as income to the new york state tax authorities. the conduct i just described is felony criminal conduct in new york state. true and accurate business records are important everywhere to be sure. they are always the more important in manhattan. the financial center of the world. that is why we have a history in the manhattan da s office of
again, i go back to these being business transactions conducted with the president s business. these were not taxpayer funds. i m not justifying this. the president has denied this. i m looking at this and wondering what we re in for now. where this likely goes now, john. what do you think? first, you re going to have all of those legal challenges we ve been discussing. then you re going to have i assume a motion to move the location of the trial because president trump already has told us he doesn t believe he can get a fair trial in new york. suppose the judge here doesn t grant that. then you re going to have the whole show of trying to go through each potential juror and ask them if they re biassed. each side will try to get in their background. that will take a long time. it will be quite a while before we get to the opening statements of the prosecution and the
just pointed out, there s no description of what the crime actually is that leads this to be a felony. president trump might have a good case that he s being charged by a vague law that criminal laws have to be precise, you have to be precisely told what is illegal. otherwise your due process rights have been violated. he can claim that bragg has not allowed to prosecute federal law by pretending it s some kind of state misdemeanor or felony. the supreme court has said that s unconstitutional. there s so many then you have one last one. all this happened while outside the statute of limitations. you have two years for a misdemeanor in new york, five years for a felony to bring a case. both of those clocks have expired. i think what will happen is that trump s lawyers as you said in the early fall, will make these motions, a judge will have to rule on them, you ll have oral arguments and that could go on appeal through the new york court system through the u.s.
as an avenue to enforce federal campaign finance law. now maybe that is what he s planning to do. but he s got to tell us what he s planning to do. more importantly, he has to tell donald trump. so i think this indictment, even before you get to the statute of limitations, i would dismiss it on its face because it fails to state a crime. here it fails to state a crime 34 times. it is the function of an indictment in the criminal justice system to to two things. it has to put a defendant on notice of exactly what he s being charged with, which is to say which crimes he s being acuted of committing and it then gives the defendant, the second part, a vehicle so if he s ever charged with that again, he can use the first indictment to plead double jeopardy. in order to make that work, you have to tell the defendant what it is that you re accusing him of.