court. will trump follow suit? and just in, police releasing new surveillance video showing the jacksonville killer moments before he opened fire, targeting black shoppers. this as we re learning more about why he was forced to abandon what may have been an original plan. and prepare for evacuate. warnings now up for florida s gulf coast as tropical storm idalia rapidly intensifies. it is expected to be a major hurricane by the time it makes landfall. let s go outfront. good evening. i m erica hill in for erin burnett. outfront tonight, trump on trial. a federal judge announcing his 2020 election interference case will begin in march of next year. that is two years sooner than trump s team had requested. they wanted it pushed out to april of 2026. judge tanya chutkan saying it will actually begin in six months on march 4th, to be exact. that s one day before super tuesday. and while we re keeping track here, it also comes just two months before the start of his classi
Scratching their head and saying, wait a minute, what about this date, does it actually help donald trump in some says, jonah? big picture, no. it helps him with his role in the primaries and how the base is going to rally around him and all that. but that was going to be the case no matter what. basically the first question you have to ask is should this trial go before the election or after the election? and if you think it should go before the election, for whatever reason, legal, political, moral, entertainment, whatever, then it s basically impossible to find a good date that wouldn t prompt trump to say election interference. because he announced incredibly early that he was running for president so he would be able to claim election interference if he was ever prosecuted for anything. it s his legal and political strategy. it s just going to be baked into the cake of all the discourse about this stuff. this is just more of the same. it is just more of the same. i think tha
Into court and basically said that when brad raffensperger had the phone call that mark meadows had set up between him and donald trump that there was no lawful way to change the outcome of the election. so i think it was a pretty tough day. that said, it s a low threshold for mark meadows to show in order to have this removed to federal court. so i don t think we have any great insight as to what will happen. but i don t think it was a particularly good day for him. i have to say most attorneys i spoke with last week said to me they would be surprised if he did in fact take the stand. so the fact that he did today, how risky do you think that was for him? it s incredibly risky. most criminal defendants would not testify under oath about the actual facts of the case in an evidentiary hearing that has nothing to do really with your actual trial. don t forget he hasn t seen the evidence yet, he hasn t sat through the whole trial. if he were going to testify at his trial, would be aft
When he was on calls with rudy giuliani, he said that was part of his role as a scheduler, part of making sure that from a federal prosecute iv that elections were being carried out. he said something similarly when asked about setting up the call between donald trump and brad raffensperger, that that was part of his job as white house chief of staff, even though raffensperger testified that the federal government doesn t play a role in certifying the results at this state level. to give you a sense of how broadly the meadows team is viewing his responsibilities, here s part of what played out. the judge asked meadows attorney at one point, could he be acting under federal authority if trump wasn t acting under federal authority. and meadows attorney says the answer is definitely yes. so, again, meadows was on the stand for about 3 1/2 hours in a hearing that lasted all day long. the judge did not rule from the bench, but he said he will do so quickly. so we re expecting a ruling on
About donald trump. corrupt, criminal, or crooked, the most common response. liar, dishonest and untrustworthy. what do you make of those numbers? i, for one, am not going to sit here and gainsay the wisdom of the american people. obviously, that s going to be breaking down in a partisan way. you re not getting a lot of people who are inclined to vote for trump with that kind of word association there. but it does point to the general problem that donald trump has, which is that he s extremely popular among the subset of americans that he s extremely popular with. the broader american public, much less so. and as i was saying here the other night, his whole argument since he got into the white house to begin with has always been to sort of feed red meat to his base, always play to his base, never forget his base, with the assumption that somehow that expands his suspect generally. and it s like the salesman who says sure we lose money on every sale, but i ll make it up in