"There is no way that he will not be charged. One, it is a tape recording. Even though the reporting is there are also witnesses, so there could be a tape recording with witnesses, it involves not just possession of classified information, but the dissemination of classified information. That puts it into a completely different ballpark when you are at the Department of Justice examining the seriousness of the violation and whether to bring charges."
They compared it to the tapes of Donald Trump speaking to Sean Hannity and from the CNN town hall where Kaitlan Collins probed him about if he still had classified documents.
"So what is the point of all this?" Whoopi Goldberg asked. "You know he's lying. He lies four seconds after you've heard him say good morning. I'm not being — I'm not trying to be funny. I'm trying to understand why he thinks the American people are so stupid that they're not going to remember from time to time, from incident to incident, what he's done. What is going on here?"
"I think that he gambles that his base doesn't care. It's not that they're stupid exactly, but they don't care what he does," Joy Behar said. "Like he said, I can shoot someone on Fifth Avenue. He's so stupid in a certain way. First of all, you were caught on tape saying you would grope women by their patooties, caught on tape trying to blackmail Georgia. He's always caught on tape. You would think he would know better than to keep taping himself."
They also recalled Trump being recorded with reporter Bob Woodward admitting the pandemic would "kill a lot of people," and a conversation where he attempted to extort Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
"What's most scary to me about this particular information that came out is that he admits that it's still classified, that it should have been declassified before leaving the White House, and he wants to share information from the document, but knows his ability to declassify it is limited because he's no longer president," said Sunny Hostin.
"He's crazy like a fox. That terrifies me. In my view, legally, what's most often the most difficult is intent, right? You've got to prove what was going on inside someone's mind. It's not like they have little bubbles over their head when they're testifying, saying I wanted to declassify it, and I didn't. Now you have a tape."
She noted that she would never call a case a "slam dump, but man, oh, man."
They began joking about the "lock him up" chants, but Goldberg compared it to police body cameras. "It doesn't always work out for folks."
Hostin explained that just having the documents would be enough to convict Trump, never mind refusing to give them back, talking about them and showing them to people.
"Well, it may not go away. If some people have their way, the president of the United States is going to be presiding over the country from federal prison, because that's still — you can still do that."
See the conversation in the video below or at the link here.
