thank you so much for letting us into your homes during these extraordinary times. we are grateful. the beat are ari melber starts roelgt now on this today. our top story a beat special report about trump s criminal enterprises, how we got here and why it matters. to put it simply there s a key link between this new conviction of trump, the person, and the legal accountability for trump s organizations, which have long been found criminal in our legal system. so let s begin with these two realities. first last week s news and then the news that has dogged trump s organizations for years. there are guilty verdicts. we are looking at count one guilty, count two guilty. count three guilty. we re hearing guilty on one through five. starting on count six. count six guilty. count seven guilty. count eight guilty. count 27 guilty, count 34, guilty. the unanimous jury verdict unanimous on all counts. that is trump s guilt. then there s his top aides across many ye
you count and calculate, at least 20 other aides were indicted across different places 12 of them now convicted, some by their own confessions in georgia and new york, others by jury of their peers like manafort in georgia and new york and others. there s no debate over the trump aides who pled guilty. they confessed to their crimes for trump. as m&m put it so so simply they told prosecutors i am what you say i am, guilty. if i wasn t, then why would you say i am. it doesn t get any simpler than that. guilty. guilty. guilty. guilty. they re guilty legally. this is not an observation, this is not an opinion. this is their words under the pressure of their evidence and their view that confessing to their guilt earlier would be
politically and personally they feel they have to defend anything he does, they just have to say words they may not even personally believe. one of the responses we ve heard from conservatives who used to talk of police and law and order and complying with police and honoring juries, one of the things we ve heard from them is trump is somehow uniquely targeted, that anyone could become a felon now, this was only about targeting one person, donald trump. now that last gasp from people who are on record contradicting that kind of effort to undermine our system, police do the arresting and the juries do the fact finding, that last gasp is weak one. it won t take us long to deal with empireically, so those are fackical claims. and think about how they are contradicted by everything we just saw in the last 13 minutes or so, they re not true. they don t make sense. trump last week was convicted after years of ducking or dodging other cases and only after at least depending on how
crime at the intersection of his campaign and business activities comes after all these convictions of campaign and business aides. so after years where people did fairly know that trump himself had not been convicted and was legally presumed in the in many open cases, we are now in this new terrain. and there s been so much criming and misconduct it would be easy to lose sight of that important context. the legal system has showed this isn t where a lawyer had bad judgment it could be a ceo in the 60s and had an employee convicted of crimes and yet the i.e. didn t know about them. here s the difference now. the courts has determined this is not like that. this follows the convictions of key leaders and operators in
convicted of campaign crime and then of course a witness that ended in trump s conviction last week. he was convicted in this trial that let s remember now that we see it all together features witnesses who literally detailed their role in 2016 crimes. the tabloid boss pecker had federal immunity, cohen had already gone to prison, and manafort and stone they weren t involved necessarily in a big way in this trial. their names came up at times here and there. bannon s name came up as well, but they were convicted for other things after 2016. that s a campaign apparatus. that s the criminal enterprise now you see the guy at the top and so many people near the top convicted. all of this makes these past convictions all the more important now that trump s role has been formally found by a jury and through our legal process as the felon at the top. trump ally roger stone found guilty today on all seven counts