Former President Donald Trump ranted against vaccine booster shots and falsely insisted that the Covid-19 virus was "virtually gone" when he left office.
During an interview with Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo on Wednesday, Trump said that he was "proud" to have taken the Covid vaccine.
"When I was president, you didn't have this problem with people not wanting to take it," he said. "They don't take it because they don't trust Biden and they don't trust the Biden administration. When I was president, you didn't have people protesting the vaccine."
"He's now president and he's doing a lousy job with coronavirus," the former president continued. "Coronavirus is back. If that ever happened to me where it came back, ok, when I left it was virtually gone. It was over. Now it's coming back through the delta [variant] and I don't know if you even want to call it that. All you call it is the China virus."
Trump also expressed doubt about the need for vaccine booster shots.
"That sounds to me like a money-making operation from Pfizer," Trump opined. "Think of the money involved. A booster shot, that's tens of billions of dollars. How good of a business is that? If you're a businessman, you say, 'You know what? Let's give them another shot.'"
"You wouldn't think you would need a booster," he added. "When these first came out, they were good for life. Then they were good for a year or two. And I could see the writing on the wall, you could see the dollar signs in their eyes."
Reacting to plans by Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) to show up in Manhattan on Tuesday to protest the criminal arraignment of indicted Donald Trump, one of her colleagues in the House remarked that it is her right, but her efforts will be a waste of time.
Appearing on MSNBC with host Jonathan Capehart, Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) dismissed out of hand Taylor Greene's rush to Trump's defense which will include her visit to Manhattan, saying: "It's not going to do any good."
"What's your reaction to your fellow member of Congress, Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene saying she's gonna come to New York to protest the indictment?" host Capehart asked.
"Well she certainly can go to New York to protest the indictment, it's not going to do any good. It's not going to stop it," she dismissively replied.
"I think that she's just gaining more publicity and more attention to herself but he has been indicted and there's nothing that she can do about it at this point," she continued. "As a matter of fact, she has a reputation for being outrageous -- someone that is not to be taken seriously, and so she'll just continued with that reputation by going to protest. She could not in any way interfering with justice at this point. Justice is on the move."
During an appearance on MSNBC early Saturday morning, attorney Lanny Davis, who is representing former Donald Trump "fixer" Michael Cohen, targeted House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) for attempting to run interference for the former president.
Speaking with host Katie Phang, Davis claimed Jordan's so-called "weaponization" hearings should be looking into the actions of Trump's Department of Justice.
"This is probably the ultimate hypocrisy and that is to have Congressman Jordan, of all people, talking about the weaponization of the Justice Department when he was silent when Trump's Justice Department, according to the U.S. attorney that he appointed, Jeffrey Berman, was intervening in Michael Cohen's case in order to erase the record of Donald Trump being accused by his own prosecutors of directing Michael Cohen to pay the hush money," he told the MSNBC host.
"So, Congressman Jordan and the weaponization people forget that when Michael Cohen was released during Covid he was ordered back to prison because he wouldn't agree not to write a book and when the Justice Department prosecutors filed papers that were false, saying they have nothing to do with the book, a federal judge rejected what they said and released Michael."
Directing his next comments at Jordan he added, "If that isn't grounds for an investigation about false representations by federal prosecutors under the influence of Donald Trump -- that is a example, a factual example found by a federal judge, of the weaponization of the Justice Department --I don't know what is."
According to attorneys who have appeared in Judge Juan Merchan's Manhattan courtroom, the jurist is fair, patient, listens well and is, as one colleague called him, "Bright, kind of chill."
That should be good news for Donald Trump who will be appearing before Merchan next week when he is brought up on the reported thirty charges contained in a sealed indictment being handled by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.
Unfortunately for the former president, Merchan has already overseen another case involving Trump and has witnessed first-hand how the former president's lawyers have conducted themselves and so he is well aware of the stunts they might try to pull.
According to the Daily Beast's Jose Pagliery, Merchan was the judge who ruled in the Trump Organization tax fraud case that resulted in a $1.6 million judgment, as well as sending CFO Allen Weisselberg to jail, and the normally even-keeled judge was highly critical of Trump's legal team's conduct in the courtroom.
As Pagliery wrote, "Trump’s [previous] legal tactics absolutely set him off," adding, "While presiding over the tax fraud trial of two Trump Organization companies in December, Merchan repeatedly lost his patience as Trump’s corporate lawyers broke the rules—leading witnesses, reading parts of transcripts jurors weren’t allowed to hear, and trying to distract the jury by duping them into thinking the case was about Trump the man, not his companies."
"At one point during the trial, he repeatedly dragged Trump Corp. and Trump Payroll Corp. attorneys into a quiet sidebar to privately admonish them for making baseless objections to interrupt prosecutors—only to have them defy him minutes later, forcing the judge to send the jury out of the room," sternly telling them, 'It’s your responsibility to make sure… this doesn’t happen again,'" Pagliery wrote.
With the recent history in mind, and with Trump lashing out at the judge already on social media, the report suggests Trump's lawyers will likely be on a short leash in a trail that will have the country's undivided attention.
