3 Things To Watch for During Trump’s Arraignment

As any good mayor would do, as chief custodian of his city, the mayor of New York City, Eric Adams, laid down the law to Black Lives Matter protestors, telling them in no uncertain terms that any type of disorderly conduct from vandalism to violence will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Take a listen. 

“Maybe some rabble rousers are thinking about coming to our city tomorrow. The message is clear and simple. Control yourselves. New York City is our home, not a playground for your misplaced anger. We are the safest large city in America because we respect the rule of law in New York City. And although we have no specific threats, people like Marjorie Taylor Green, who is known to spread misinformation in hate speech of she stated, she’s coming to town while you are in town. Be on your best behavior. As always, we will not allow violence or vandalism of any kind. And if one is caught participating in any act of violence, they will be arrested and held accountable.” 

Oh, wait a second. Wait a second. Wait a second. Did I say Eric Adams was warning Black Lives Matter not to be violent. I’m sorry. I meant Eric Adams was warning Trump supporters not to be violent. No, no, no, no, no. Eric Adams never warned Black Lives Matter to control themselves. Eric Adams never warned Black Lives Matter not to commit vandalism or violence. Eric Adams never excoriated Black Lives Matter for their so-called misplaced anger. He just let them destroy the city. We have a lot to talk about today. President Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in just a couple of hours, and there are three things that we all need to watch for during this arraignment, and that’s what I want to talk about with you right now. So let’s get to it. 

And by the way, when New York City Mayor Eric Adams says, control yourselves to Trump supporters, this is not a playground for your misplaced anger. He, he provides a caveat and says, we don’t, we don’t actually have any specific threats. I’m just sitting up here and blustering because I don’t like the politics of the people who are going to be peacefully assembling outside of the Manhattan Courthouse when President Trump is unjustly arraigned tomorrow. It’s funny because when the Black Lives Matter rioters took over Manhattan, specifically when the New York police said that they were going to reinstitute their, their, their special crime unit. Hawk Newsom, who is the chapter president of a Black Lives Matter chapter, specifically threatened violence and bloodshed. If the New York Police Department were to reinstitute this, this special crime unit violence and bloodshed. He verbally threatened this. And yet Eric Adams says, Trump supporters should control themselves. 

Trump support supporters should control themselves. Listen, if I’m a Trump supporter, I’m pretty nervous about being in New York City. I’m not sure that I’m going to take part in any kind of rally, any kind of protest as righteously, indignant, and as angry as we all are today. I’m not sure I take part in those kinds of protests, because haven’t we already seen how the radical left treats us? Haven’t we already seen how these neo-Marxists in government treated the January 6th protestors, even the ones that did basically nothing? And what did they get in return? Some of them are still rotting in prison pretrial in solitary confinement. Two years later, they were entrapped by the feds. There, there was a defense, or there was a prosecutor who admitted that feds helped provoke the January 6th riots, or the few people associated with the otherwise peaceful protests who engaged in vandalism and violence. 

I don’t think so. No, thank you. No, thank you. So here’s the other thing. The other thing is in New York City, after the Black Lives Matter riots that cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In fact, a lot of the crimes that were committed it was looting high-end stores were looted on Fifth Avenue by these Black Lives Matter protests. Because remember, they’re all about justice. They’re all about equality under the law. They’re all about stopping police violence. They’re all about racial equity. No, no. They just want their expensive purses and their shoes, and they don’t want to pay for it. So they’re going to break the glass of the stores. They’re going to go in like common thugs. They’re going to steal those items and they’re going to run away, and they’re going to pretend that they did this all for Black Lives Matter. I don’t think so. There were two lawyers associated with the Black Lives Matter riots in New York City that committed acts of terrorism, not just vandalism, which is bad enough, not just violence, which is horrendous enough. 

Not just burglary robbery. This, these, this looting, which is bad enough. These two lawyers, a man and a woman committed an act of terrorism. They took a Molotov cocktail, which is a type of bomb, an explosive, and they threw this Molotov cocktail at a New York City police car. It exploded. The police car, the police car went up in flames. It was an effective terrorist attack. Now, fortunately, this police car was empty at the time. The police officer or officers were not in the car at the time. So these officers weren’t either injured to the extreme brutally burned or killed. It was empty. But the act of terrorism doesn’t make a difference. I mean, it still was an act of terrorism. And what happened in New York City? What did the New York City, the law enforcement apparatus, the District Attorney, do in response to this? 

Well, first, these two individuals were charged as terrorists. They were charged with really serious crimes. And they would’ve spent, you know, probably 30 years in prison, which is what they deserved because they were terrorists. But then what happened? What happened? These two lawyers reached some kind of secret plea deal, some secret plea deal where they pled down to just, you know, some, some sort of piddly, little, little charges. And they pled guilty to the charges, so it didn’t have to go to trial. And what was their sentence? One year and one day in prison. Mm, 366 days in the slammer for an act of terrorism. So I don’t want to hear New York City Mayor Eric Adams pretend that Trump supporters who are peacefully assembling in New York City, outside of the Manhattan Courthouse, when there’s been no, even the intelligence apparatus of the New York City police and the F B I and the entire federal government and the Secret Service have detected no credible threats of violence from Trump supporters. 

I don’t want to hear squat from Mayor Adams blaming Trump supporters for non-existent violence when real violence hit the city at the hands of neo-Marxist Black Lives Matter thugs. And he did nothing. Nothing at all. What’s happening today is selective enforcement of the law. The Black Lives Matter comparison with Trump supporters. That’s an example of it. But this is rampant. This is widespread. It’s at the most extreme that we have ever seen it in our nation. When a former president of the United States and current presidential candidate is being charged with what a piddly little technicality that hardly even qualifies as a process crime. And if by the way you’re Hillary Clinton, it definitely doesn’t qualify as process crime, because she did the same thing. Remember what the technicality here is, the technicality is that Trump, on his paperwork, said that the payments that he was repaying Michael Cohen, after Michael Cohen paid Stormy Daniels, whose real name is Stephanie Clifford, this hush money payment for to make her quiet about this alleged affair that she had, that she had accused Trump of engaging in, which by the way, stormy Daniels later recanted and said, actually, no, it wasn’t true. 

So what this was is it wasn’t even a hush money payment. This was a nuisance payment. A woman was leaving a false allegation against President Trump that could have harmed his reputation and harmed his marriage. And he paid her off to shut her up because she’s a liar. And when Michael Cohen paid her off and Trump was paying Michael Cohen back, he wrote down that it, that the payments were legal fees, even though they, they weren’t technically legal fees. And oh, by golly, Alvin Bragg’s going to get Trump for that one. This is an unequal application of justice. This is what we see in countries like China. This is what we see in countries like Russia, where they take this, the barest sliver of a technicality, and they use that to imprison their political opponents. 

It’s disgusting. It’s disgusting. And my question, my question today, in the lead up, we’re a couple of hours away from when Trump is going to enter the courthouse. He’s scheduled to go to the courthouse at about 11:00 AM so a couple of hours from now, and he’s scheduled to actually be arraigned at two 15. At 11:00 AM he’s going to go through a process or he’s going to go through processing, which means he’s going to be fingerprinted. We’re not sure if he’s going to have a mugshot taken or not. I think that that’s something to watch for if he does have a mugshot taken. It, it shows you that this courthouse and this judge, and this, this entire apparatus are complicit in this humiliation attempt against Trump here. But regardless, at 11:00 AM he’s going to show up, he’s going to be fingerprinted, he’s going to be processed. Maybe he’ll have a mugshot taken. 

And then at 2:15, he goes in the courtroom to plead not guilty to this indictment. The indictment is sealed right now, we don’t know, quote unquote, we don’t know what’s in it. We do actually know what’s in it because the district attorney’s office selectively leaked to the New York Times to give everyone an idea that this was coming. So we know what’s in it. We know it’s Stormy Daniels stuff. There’s probably stuff in it about Karen McDougal, which is another woman that Michael Cohen paid money for an NDA so that she would stop yammering about the allegations that she was levying against Trump. We’ll have to wait and see exactly what these charges are, but President Trump is sure to plead not guilty. three things that I’m going to watch for throughout the day today. First as President Trump enters the courthouse, then during the arraignment, and then later on tonight when President Trump is scheduled, at least right now, to give a, an address, I think 8:15 is the time, eight o’clock 8:15. 

He’s scheduled to give an address at Mar-a-Lago. He is planning on going back to Florida after this, after this arraignment. Three things that I’m watching for are whether or not the judge allows cameras in the courtroom. This is up to the discretion of the judge. The judge can decide, yes, you can broadcast this, you can film this. Or the judge can say, Nope, you can’t film this. president Trump and his attorneys have requested that cameras not be allowed in the courtroom. They say it poses a security risk. I think we also know that this is just an we’re all kind of curious to see it. I mean, I wouldn’t mind watching it myself. However, the left is just going to use this as a humiliation tactic for Trump. So I understand why the Trump team wouldn’t want this to be viewed. I do think there’s actually some protection for Trump in allowing it to be broadcast, because then the left cannot portray what happened in the courtroom in an unfair way. 

We would be able to see and hear for ourselves exactly what went down. Which leads me to the second thing that I am looking for, which is the gag order. We’re expecting that a gag order is going to be issued against Trump. That that the judge will tell President Trump and hopefully also the prosecution. It should be both ways, but you never know that the, that we’re expecting that the judge will tell Trump that he’s not allowed to discuss this case at all. We’re going to talk a little bit more about the intricacies in the legality of the gag order. I was just talking to one of the most prominent defense attorneys in the nation about whether this is typical, whether this is abnormal. What, what this would be an in, what, what this would be an indication of, does this show that, you know, they really don’t want to bias a jury? 

Or does this show that this is political targeting? We’re going to talk about that too. And the third thing that I’m watching for is whether President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris are going to say anything about this. Because as of now, we have heard squat from the two of them. And maybe that makes sense because this is the political targeting of their political opposition. The man who’s declared that he’s running for president against them. But they’ve said nothing about the abuse of power of this prosecutor and how dangerous this is, regardless of your political affiliation. It doesn’t matter if you hate Trump. Maybe you’d never want to vote for Trump. Maybe you think he’s orange man bad. But at some point, you have to step back from those emotions and say, listen, it doesn’t matter if I think this guy is like a walking Cheeto. It doesn’t matter because if, when the Democrats are in power, we allow them to politically target their opponents just because they don’t like his politics and they don’t want him to be president, and they don’t want to campaign against him, then what happens when we have corrupt Republicans in office? 

Are they going to prosecute Democrat political opponents just because they’re Democrats and the Republicans don’t want to run against the Democrat and don’t want the Democrat to be president? Is this a precedent you want to set? Because any time you do set a precedent like this, it turns around and bites you in the rear end. It’s just like when the Democrats discarded the filibuster for, for judicial nominees. At first Republicans were like, well, wait a second. This is unfair. You’re just trying to ram through your nominees. But it turns out it came back and bit the Democrats because what did we do with all of the judicial nominees of President Trump, including Supreme Court Justices? Well, the filibuster wasn’t in place, and so we were able to confirm all of these Supreme Court justices to the court and ultimately overturned Roe v. Wade, all because the Democrats discarded the filibuster for judicial nominees. 

It’s going to come back and bite you. So let’s talk about the process for a second before we talk about the gag order. Yesterday, President Trump took Trump force one, his personal plane from Florida where he lives up to LaGuardia Airport in New York. He then took a motorcade from LaGuardia to Trump Tower where he spent the night. This morning, we can expect a motorcade from Trump Tower to the Manhattan Courthouse. Trump right now is scheduled to arrive there about 11:00 AM This motorcade will have a pretty clear shot to the Manhattan Courthouse because the streets around the courthouse and surrounding Trump Tower and surrounding the streets, this route that they’re going to drive have been closed down. This is like locked down security. Every single NYPD officer is in uniform and on duty. This is over 30,000 officers plus secret service. 

You could not have, I can’t think of an event actually where security has been tighter than this. Trump will be fingerprinted, processed, possibly he will, he will be subjected to a mugshot. There’s no indication right now that he’s going to be put into handcuffs. We’ll have to see about that, I suppose. Then the courtroom arraignment happens at two 15 and it’s there where he will plead guilty or not guilty. I think we all know how he’s going to plead. Trump’s lawyers ask that cameras be banned from the courtroom. This is what they said. We submit that the media request should be denied because it will create a circus-like atmosphere at the arraignment. It will raise unique security concerns and is inconsistent with President Trump’s presumption of innocence. 

I’m kind of torn on this one. If I’m Trump, I totally understand this. I don’t want to be subject to international humiliation when it’s such an unjust proceeding. It’s such it’s political targeting using our legal system. I wouldn’t want to have that made public either. But as a member of the public, I actually do want cameras to be in the room because I want to see for myself and hear for myself exactly what is said to him. I want to hear what the judge says. I want to hear what Trump says, want to hear what lawyers say. I want to hear and see everything. I don’t trust court reporters. I don’t trust the mainstream media who we’re sitting in. I don’t trust selective leaks from partisan politicos to give me the information. I want to see it for myself. And my advice to President Trump would be go ahead and let the cameras into the courtroom, because then at least you stand a chance of disproving some of the lies. 

The mainstream media will inevitably tell one way or the other. As I said, the indictment is sealed. The charges will be revealed today. We know what the charges are, though. They’re process crimes related to crimes, quote unquote related to Stormy Daniels, probably Karen McDougal. But let’s talk about this gag order for a second. So it has been widely reported first by the Daily Mail, and then others picked it up that the judge is going to impose a gag order on President Trump, which would prohibit Trump from talking about anything related to this case. While it is an active case, while I guess if it goes to trial between now and the conclusion of the case, Trump wouldn’t be allowed to say anything about it. And you might be reacting the way I’m reacting and thinking that is bananas. That is so bananas. It’s actually an infringement or an encroachment on his presumption of innocence because we know that Democrats and elected office, the mainstream media and his political opponents, he is an active candidate for president of the United States are going to be talking about this. 

They’re going to run ads saying, President Trump was arrested. President Trump was indicted. President Trump faced a judge in a courtroom. He was arraigned and he pled not guilty. They’re going to say everything about this. And what President Trump is going to stand there, just like literally gagged, not able to defend himself. How does this not constitute election interference? That’s exactly what it is. It’s election interference. Now, right before the show, I was talking to one of the most prominent defense attorneys in the country. I had texted and asked like, is this typical, is this atypical? I know sometimes judges do issue gag orders. It’s not unheard of. But for a case like this, in a circumstance like this, is this something that should be a red flag? And the answer I got was, it’s not unheard of. But the purpose of a gag order when gag orders are issued is to protect the defendant so as not to bias the jury, if it’s something that more information could cause jury bias during the process, it’s, it’s to protect the Sixth Amendment right to a fair trial for the defendant. 

 which just seems ironic, doesn’t it? It seems very ironic because the only way to somewhat, somewhat even have the similarity of a fair trial when you obviously can’t have a fair trial when the charges are bogus, would be for Trump to be allowed to defend himself and to talk about any abnormalities or miscarriages of justice that occur along the way. It’s, it would be unreal if a judge issued this, this gag order because the First Amendment right, your First Amendment right to free speech is presumed in every case. The bar has to be very high for your First Amendment right to, to be restricted in some way. In fact, a gag order is typically not aimed at the defendant. The gag order’s typically aimed at everyone else to protect the defendant. But the Manhattan District Attorney’s office has already violated the spirit of a rule like this by selectively leaking to the New York Times. 

So a gag order would be unfair to President Trump when the other side has already leaked information that has damaged President Trump’s chance of a fair trial. Again, maybe it’s just a quote unquote fair trial because you can’t have a fair trial when the charges and the process itself are fake and rigged by partisan politicos. But Mike Davis is a lawyer, and this is what he said. He said by the way, Mike Davis used to work for the senate for like the Judiciary Confirmation Committee. So he’s well aware of the process. Here he goes, gag orders generally protect the Sixth Amendment right of defendants to fair trials. Defendants still have First Amendment rights ordering any defendant not to speak about his charges would almost certainly violate the First Amendment telling a presidential candidate. He cannot respond to allegations, including media leaks in a political prosecution is un-American. 

Here’s the other thing, the other interesting part here is generally in cases where there is a gag order issued, the people who are speaking out against it are media reporters and journalists, political commentators, media outlets hate gag orders because then they can’t report on the story. But listen very closely and read headlines very carefully. What do you see? You see not a peep from liberal outlets condemning this impending gag order because they’re not really journalists. They’re not really reporters, they’re not really committed to the news or getting you information. They hate President Trump. They want the system rigged against him, and they don’t mind making up lies anyway. So it doesn’t matter if they have real information, they’re going to spin whatever crap they want to spin anyway. And Trump won’t be able to defend himself against it. It’s evil. It’s so evil. It’s so evil. Think about the different lies that have been told about President Trump on a large scale. 

I’m not just talking about in campaign ads and on Twitter, I’m talking about lies that have, that have been told about President Trump, that have been levied against him, like allegations of criminal wrongdoing. So we had the allegation that he was a Russian agent, that he colluded with Vladimir Putin to rig the 2016 election to defeat Hillary Clinton. This went to Robert Mueller, a special counsel. It was a lie. Then we had this allegation that President Trump was corrupt. That he that he compromised our national security by something that he said to Ukrainian President Zelensky about looking into the Hunter Biden allegations. He was impeached for that, for goodness sake, for a readout of a call that was leaked by a partisan, by a partisan in his National Security Council who just didn’t like the way that he was handling Ukraine. 

He’s, he was accused during the campaign of sexual assault. Like we all know that President Trump was promiscuous, at least in his younger years. He was open about that. But sexual assault, this is a hideous allegation to make without proof. And he got allegation after allegation that just fell through. The details fell through. This wasn’t true, but the media acted like the allegation was the verdict. They acted like he was automatically guilty just because someone made an allegation against him. And then of course, the Mar-a-Lago raid. What was the allegation? The first allegation from, I think it was the Washington Post who said, oh, President Trump is keeping nuclear secrets. That’s what’s in the highly classified documents. And people were speculating, maybe because he wants to sell them to foreign countries. Like what, what? 

Of course, the media doesn’t care about a gag order because they’re going to make up lies about President Trump and they don’t want him allowed to defend himself. It’s despicable. So this judge presiding over the arraignment is the Manhattan acting Supreme Court justice. His name is Juan Merchan. He has donated before to Democrat judges, a judge by the name of Rolando Acosta was appointed by Cuomo and Merchan has donated to him. So we can see right from the beginning that even a judge who’s supposed to be neutral, who’s supposed to get their politics as much to themselves as they possibly can, except for the way they personally vote, they’re allowed to have political opinions, but we shouldn’t see evidence of that publicly. They’re judges. They’re supposed to be neutral. This guy’s not neutral. He’s not neutral. So will he allow cameras? Will he impose a gag order? 

We’ll have to wait and see. So here’s, here’s what I’m wondering though. All these different scenarios, like what happens in these different scenarios, there are, there are several things that could happen here. Trump could be indicted, which he is indicted and arraigned, but then not convicted. And if he is arraigned, he pleads not guilty, and somehow this case falls apart. Or I guess he could go to a jury trial, and they could find him not guilty. Although that’s not going to happen for reasons. I’ll tell you in just a second. If he’s not convicted, then I think overall this really helps his campaign for president because it’s coalesced, it’s rallied his base behind him in support of him. And if he’s not convicted, it’s not going to be an anchor around his neck with a gag order, with media coverage, with just the fact that he’s going to have to suffer through this trial. 

It’s going to be a benefit to his campaign overall. If he’s indicted and is put under gag order and then the process drags out, this is going to be a real anchor around his neck. That’s why I expect a gag order, because this is going to significantly harm his ability to campaign for president the, by the way, and if he violates the gag order, the penalty for that in the state of New York is either a thousand dollars fine or 30 days in jail. And I think we know which the left would want to impose not a thousand dollars fine, which is literally nothing to Trump. They want him in the slammer. That’s contempt of court, by the way, if he, if he violates a gag order, if he is indicted and pleads not guilty, and this makes it to a jury trial, which is going to be difficult because jurors are supposed to not know a lot about the case. 

There’s no way that anyone in this country who would be qualified to be a juror, a jury of Trump’s peers, would not have heard about this before. He’s going to be convicted, not because the facts of the case should equal a conviction, but because the area where this indictment happened in Manhattan is a very leftist area. It’s going to be, the jury would be populated with people who hate him. People who vote for vote for vote for Congress. People like, like AOC people who literally think that Trump is the personification of like modern day Hitler and, and the devil all wrapped up in in an orange spray tan. These people would be on the jury. They don’t care about the charges, they don’t care about the statute. They don’t care about being the neutral application of the law. They just want to do anything they can if they have the opportunity to put him in jail. 

So if it goes to trial there’s a pretty good chance that he’s convicted whether or not he should be, and he obviously should not be. So the question then is does he go to jail? Like, what, what happens in this case? Because a, a conviction in this case, if you’re just a regular person, wouldn’t be, it would either be like no jail time or very little jail time. But what about a former president of the United States and a current candidate for president of the United States? Do they actually try to put him in jail? Do they try to put him in prison? How does that even work? Like, what does the Secret service do? Do they take like the cells next door and the cells above and below because that’s what they do in hotels? Do they just camp out in the hallway? Do they, do they try to put Trump under house arrest? And if they put him under house arrest, how is this not election interference? Because he’s supposed to be on the campaign trail, he’s traveling all around doing events, and if he’s not allowed to leave his home, he can’t do events, therefore, this would be interference in the election, right? How does this even work? 

And if he is convicted to different states that maybe don’t allow felons to run, did they take his name off the ballot and if they take his name off the ballot, does he try to write, run as a write-in? How would other candidates react to this? God forbid it comes to any of this, I hope it doesn’t, I hope that this falls apart just as quickly as, well, not as quickly, but I hope it falls apart as completely as the Russia collusion hoax and the Ukraine impeachment and all of these different things, and the January 6th hoax and every way that they have tried to get Trump in the Mar-a-Lago raid. But what if it doesn’t? What happens then in this process? Like what actually happens? This is, this is unprecedented. You’ll notice that this is the only time candidates often try to verbally criminalize their opponents. 

Trump did this in 2016 with Hillary on the campaign trail. They try to really vilify their opponents, Trump’s rallies. People were shouting, lock her up. And it was great because Hillary Clinton is obviously a criminal and she should be locked up. But this was like the backbone of Trump’s of Trump’s 2016 campaign. We all remember this. This was the way he rallied even Democrats against Hillary Clinton by constantly highlighting her criminality. But as soon as Trump got into office, there were a lot of us who were like, great, now go get her. And he didn’t, he dropped the whole thing. He was just like, well, that’s in the past. We don’t want to look like we’re targeting our political opponents. Let’s just move on. And I, I personally thought that that was the wrong thing to do. I personally thought that, you know, if someone committed a crime so egregious like Hillary Clinton did this pay to play scheme in this, this egregious mishandling of classified information and then lying about it, like, you got to hold someone like that accountable, for goodness sake, of course you do. 

But President Trump, even President Trump, I should say maybe, one of the most bombastic presidents in modern history, even President Trump didn’t want to target her for this. because that’s, it’s better to let presidents or presidential candidates who’ve committed crimes get away with some of them, even though I don’t fundamentally agree with letting people get away with crimes. It’s better for presidents, former presidents and presidential candidates to get away with minor crimes than for it to appear that an administration is targeting their political opponent with the law. Because the peaceful transfer of power is so pivotal to our self-governance that if, if people’s perception of it is tarnished at all, then we’ve lost the faith of the voting public in our system of government. And that’s where we are right now. And this targeting of President Trump, like arguably, it’s not even a crime. 

And if it is nothing of a technicality that no one literally cares. No one gives a flying rat’s tale, but they’re targeting, and him, and it is political targeting and it’s unprecedented. And you’ll notice who hasn’t said a single word about this. Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, nothing. Nothing. They haven’t even said, you know, this is a sad day. We’re going to acknowledge that this has happened. We’re going to, we’re going to let this play out. We’re concerned about the perception of the political targeting of our opponents in the 2024 presidential race. Nothing. They’ve said squats, because these people, Biden and Kamala are bad, bad people. These people want to target their political opponents. They’re so afraid of Republicans that they don’t think they can compete fairly in an election against Republicans because the American people agree with the principles that Republicans espouse and don’t agree with a Marxism that the Biden administration has embraced. And so they lie, and they steal, and they cheat, and they weaponize the power of the government against their political opponents. What I would pay to see the communications between the Manhattan District Attorney’s office and the federal government, there is going to be a trove of evidence that the Biden administration knew exactly what was happening behind the scenes if they didn’t outright direct it. Thank you for watching. Thank you for listening. I’m Liz Wheeler. This is the Liz Wheeler Show.