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Courtroom which is kind of seeing how small this courtroom actually is and how closely everybody will be sitting, especially when it comes to testimony from some star witnesses. so you re going to have obviously the former president in that krourt room along with his courtroom along with his attorneys. at times maybe michael cohen, karen mcdougal, stormy daniels feet from former president donald trump when this trial gets up and going next week. thanks. danny, do you think that there s any way donald trump ends up testifying? regardless of what happens at this sandoval hearing. i usually just play the odds. in i m playing the odds, the odds are that he will help testify. every defendant has a constitutional absolute right to take the stand. and i can tell you that criminal defense attorneys will tell you that frequently, at the outset of a trial, their clients will say i m taking the stand, i m getting up there, i m telling my story, and as the trial goes on and witness after wit ....
Needs to really make a tough decision here, if trump testifies, what he s going to allow in, and what s going to be unduly prejudiced. . the rule against character evidence is so important. i say this as a criminal defense attorney, take what i say with a block of salt. there s a rule that you can t introduce bad things somebody has done in the past. it s a rule with so many exceptions, it might as well not be a rule at all. in new york, the procedure is essentially a sandoval hearing, and what they re doing is giving trump a preview of what they would like to introduce as those prior bad acts if the judge lets them. if it were up to the state, the prosecutors, they will enter all manner of bad acts. that s why you have a hearing. generally speaking in the ....
Not he s going to testify. stay with me as i bring in our legal analyst, nbc news legal analyst, danny cevallos, and former new york assistant attorney general adam pollock. what a week. here we are. we now have a jury fully seated. a 12-person jury plus the six alternates. we got the alternates just within the last couple of hours. we have moved into the sandoval hearing, and yasmin outlined what s happening inside the courthouse. before we talk more in depth about that, first, danny, are you surprised we re at this point already? i m nonplussed. if you had asked me six days ago, i would have said jury selection, i would have said more than two weeks. i might have even said three weeks, and in fact, after day one of jury selection, i was doubling down on that because it moved so slowly. it seems like an era ago. on monday morning, they didn t get to jury selection until the afternoon, and barely made a scratch on the surface, but oh, ....
Yasmin vossoughian, and outside the courthouse. what s happening there right now? reporter: yeah, so they got up and going. they resumed court just a couple of minutes ago, about six minutes or so coming back from this lunch break: they re getting into the sandoval hearing from what i m seeing here, and let me just walk folks through. we saw a filing about two days ago from the prosecution as to what this would entail, what the sandoval hearing would entail. this is a hearing how they present how cross-examination would work if the former president and his attorneys together decided that he would take the stand in his own testimony. so they re presenting establishing really a pattern of behavior, ana, it seems in this sandoval hearing and what they would do in cross. they would be presenting, for instance, the conviction of the trump corporation, trump payroll corporation as well. lying under oath, the judgment from judge engoron, with the trump civil fraud trial. ....