Legal expert flags 'startling' detail about Trump's interview with probation officer

Donald Trump underwent a pre-sentencing interview with the New York probation office, but a legal expert expressed surprise the former president's attorney also took part in the meeting.

The first former president to ever be convicted of a crime completed a half-hour interview Monday with a probation officer, but Trump's was unusual in a couple of respects – he conducted his virtually from Mar-a-Lago, instead of in-person at the courthouse, and most of those meetings do not include a defense attorney.

"Right, so the goal here is for the probation officer to conduct a pre-sentence investigation that lets them write a report that the judge can use to arrive at the appropriate sentence," former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance told MSNBC's "Morning Joe." "So I think we can all readily understand the kind of questions that are relevant. Background – social background, financial background, mental health, physical health, all of the sorts of information lines that the judge needs to decide what's the most appropriate sentence under the law for this defendant."

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"You know, what's so unusual here is that Donald Trump had his lawyer sitting next to him," Vance added. "I know we focused heavily on the fact that it wasn't in-person, but New York does provide for that with someone who is out of state, or whether there might be exigent circumstances. Here, I think they avoided focusing unfairly on other defendants who were in the probation office that day by doing this remotely. But this notion that Donald Trump gets to have a lawyer sitting next to him, making sure that his answers don't subject him to any sort of inappropriate write-up in the report is a little bit startling. This is supposed to be a candid conversation between a convicted defendant and a probation officer."

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