'Jarring': Legal expert was shocked to see Trump acting like a 'defeated defendant'

Seeing defendant Trump "resigned to his fate" in court in what became a trivial attempt to convince a three-judge panel in D.C. that he's criminally untouchable was "jarring" for former prosecutor Glenn Kirschner.

Making an appearance on MSNBC's "The Last Word" with Lawrence O'Donnell, Kirschner essentially recalled reading the room and watching Trump stripped of his political pomp and forced to sit and watch his argument get scorched.

"It seemed a little tense and I will say I am not a political pundit or expert — I don't play one on TV — but it was kind of jarring to see the leading candidate for the Republican nomination for president, a former president of the United States, come in and behave entirely like a defendant and not like a politician."

"I think I know what retail politics means; he didn't look anybody in the eye, didn't take an interest in anyone around, and he kept his head down. He sort of lumbered forward to counsel table and plopped down."

For Kirschner, Trump appeared to carry himself like a "defeated defendant who was kind of resigned to his fate."

Trump's counsel Dean John Sauer did a lot of legal cartwheeling to impress upon the panel of judges in the D.C. federal court on Tuesday that Trump as POTUS could make any decision and not be subject to criminal liability.

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Kirschner characterized the entire effort as "harebrained," saying that to submit that "the only way you can prosecute a president who commits any number of crimes in office is if Congress decides to impeach him and the Senate decides to convict him."

He opined: 'Think about how that turns things on their heads... if you had a Congress that declined to impeach a president after he committed all sorts of horrendous crimes in office, that would be like Congress delivering immunity to that president because DOJ could not proceed to prosecute him."

"Or if the Congress did try to impeach him, he could resign, thereby granting himself immunity in substance."

For Kirschner it was all beyond comprehension.

"So none of this made any sense," he said. "It didn't seem to make sense to the judges, it certainly didn't make the sense to the audience members, and I think they lost this argument from jump."

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