President Donald Trump during his meeting with Democratic leaders on December 11, 2018/Screenshot
After Donald Trump's fixer Michael Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison, the president tried out a series of excuses to distance himself from the disgraced attorney.
In the past, he's also claimed to be unaware of the payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels and Playboy model Karen McDougal to silence them ahead of the election.
But NBC reports that Donald Trump was in the room when Cohen agreed to pay the women the hush money.
"Donald Trump was the third person in the room in August 2015 when his lawyer Michael Cohen and National Enquirer publisher David Pecker discussed ways Pecker could help counter negative stories about Trump's relationships with women," NBC News writes.
Donald Trump may have violated his gag order set by the New York judge in his criminal hush money trial by parroting a Fox New host's attack against potential jurors being seated in the case, according to a legal expert.
On Wednesday, during a pause in proceedings where Trump is defending himself against a 34-count indictment that he falsified business records to bury alleged sexual affairs weeks before the 2016 election, the former president quoted Fox News host Jesse Watters stating: “They are catching undercover Liberal Activists lying to the Judge in order to get on the Trump Jury."
For NYU professor and general counsel of the Department of Defense Ryan Goodman, this was a huge no-no.
"It is a very, very clear violation of the gag order," he told CNN's Erin Burnett on her show "Out Front." "The gag order's last provision says that Trump cannot make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror. Full stop."
He continued: "It's not about his intent. It's not about making statements about jurors in order to interfere with a criminal proceeding, which is part of the gag order — he just cannot make public statements about them. He just did."
The gag order was initially imposed on defendant Trump by New York Judge Juan Merchan to insulate witnesses, court staff, and jurors. But after Trump started a social media barrage against Merchan's political consultant daughter who did work for various Democratic candidates, he expanded the gag order terms to include family members of both the prosecutors and the judge.
So Trump must "refrain" from "making or directing others to make public statements about any prospective juror or any juror in the is criminal proceedings," according to the document.
The 45th president who is also the presumptive Republican nominee for president has been beside himself to lift the gag order so he can sound off at will about his disdain for the historic first criminal trial of a former president.
"I want to speak, or at least be able respond," he groused on Truth Social. "Election Interference! RIGGED, UNCONSTITUTIONAL TRIAL! Take off the Gag Order!!!"
An April 23 hearing date was scheduled after Bragg's team requested Trump be held in contempt for violating the gag order three times before the most recent Truth Social post.
"This is going to come out next week," Goodman said, adding that Trump could be threatened with contempt and even jail time "if he continues to do this."
One of Donald Trump's big defenses in the hush money criminal case is the claim that he wanted to pay women off to keep it from his wife, Melania. One legal expert said that the claim won't stand up in court because Trump was trying to wriggle out of the hush money.
Speaking on an MSNBC panel, former top Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann explained that the stories about Trump will be told "in gruesome detail."
That piqued the interest of host Nicolle Wallace: "Like what?"
Weissmann said that the seedy world of "catch and kill" stories from the National Enquirer would ultimately be a big part of the discussion.
"And why they decided, for instance, one of the key pieces of evidence for the D.A. seems to be to refute the idea that he wants to do this just to keep it from Melania is Donald Trump saying, 'Well, let's see if we could do this later and if I lose the election, who cares because I'm not doing this to keep it from my wife.'"
Weissmann is citing Trump's comments to Michael Cohen not to pay the hush money until after November. If he lost, it wouldn't matter, but if he won, he still wanted to hide it. That shows it wasn't about his wife but about his campaign and his presidency, according to the expert.
"And on day one of this case, it was Monday," Weissmann continued. "The catch and kill was more than just catch and kill. It was, ironically, a fake news campaign. It was to keep information that was damaging to Donald Trump out. But I think we're going to hear a number of details that the D.A. is correct in what he's proffering about efforts to smear his opponents."
Weissmann went on to say that one thing he anticipates they will hear is that Trump was being sent headlines to approve for the National Enquirer beforehand.
"I don't want to call this a major news outlet, but [it was] a media outlet in complete cahoots with a political campaign," Weissmann closed.
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) is in grave peril as renegade House Republicans are threatening to call a motion to remove him from power, exactly as they did for his predecessor Kevin McCarthy.
The craziest part of this whole affair, analyst David Chalian told CNN's Jake Tapper on Wednesday, is that the far-right House rebels are throwing away the power of the entire GOP House majority in its current state — coming at a moment when they were just rebuked by the summary dismissal of their articles of impeachment against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.
"Let's just start with this moment in history, which I think it's fair to say, there [are] some Republicans in disarray," said Tapper.
"I mean, when you think about the first impeachment of a cabinet secretary in 150 years that several Republicans themselves said did not meet the threshold of high crimes and misdemeanors — the entire trial was done within 3.5 hours and so clearly Democrats weren't taking it seriously, but even some Republicans had didn't meet the threshold — you have Republicans, perhaps poised to oust their second speaker in six months' time."
"Most conservative speaker in the modern history of this Congress!" interjected Tapper.
"As they are holding the majority of the House of Representatives, the one slice of government they're in charge of. And they may just go through this self-immolation exercise again of getting rid of its own speaker, all while the Republican nominee for president and the former president is sitting as a criminal defendant on trial in New York, awaiting jury selection to be completed in this first criminal case of his. It's just — it's a moment where you step back and say, you know, fiction writers would write each one of these things and you wouldn't believe it's all happening in the same day."