Former President Donald Trump's attorneys Chrisopher Kise and Alina Habba deliberately tried to anger Judge Arthur Engoron to derail a line of questioning in the New York civil fraud trial.
That's the view of legal expert Lisa Rubin, who weighed in on the day's trial proceedings on MSNBC's "Deadline: White House."
"I'm guessing if the judge who's already decided you're liable for fraud is pounding the table, that's not good for what comes next?" said anchor Nicolle Wallace.
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"There are two proceedings," said Rubin. "One is the legal trial against the Trump Organization and defendants, and there's a separate political show going on. For that purpose, I'm not sure whether Kise cared the judge pounded the table. What they were really trying to do was distract from the line of questioning that [Andrew] Amer of the attorney general's office was about to get into, which is that in 2021, when Eric and his brother participated in a conference call about the statements of financial condition, they were well into the attorney general's investigation and Eric Trump had already testified in the investigative phase. That was the deposition where he took the Fifth hundreds of times. Andrew was able to get into that, and that's when Kise took the sideswipe at the judge's clerk that set us off on a different path entirely."
"So things were going really well for Eric and Don Jr. before that," said Wallace. "Talk about how damaging that testimony could be."
"It was incredibly damning testimony until that point," confirmed Rubin. "At one point, Alina got up and said, Mr. Amer is upset and unhappy with my client's testimony. When Amer finally got a chance to speak after the fireworks settled about the law clerk, he made really clear this testimony is going great for me and in fact, made that gesture. Saying, I'm not going down that line because I'm unhappy. I'm going down that line because it's incredible to me that Eric Trump does not remember a conference call about the statements of financial condition that took place after he understood that we were investigating and well after he was concerned enough about our investigation that he took the Fifth hundreds of times. That's not credible."
Watch the video below or at the link here.
Lisa Rubin says Trump's lawyers deliberately angered the judgewww.youtube.com
