To know how weak the “hush money” case against Donald Trump is, just listen to the worries of one of its strongest supporters.
Even on MSNBC, a network teeming with hatred of all things Trump, former Justice Department spokesman Anthoney Coley stands out — penning columns calling for Trump to be jailed, and supporting Fulton County Georgia DA Fani Willis, among others.
But in an interview on the MSNBC show “Way Too Early,” he let the cat out of the bag.
Manhattan District Attorney’s prosecution of the former president is on a Memorial Day break.
As The Associated Press reported Monday, the prosecution and defense have rested, but final arguments and jury instructions loom before the case goes to the 12 men and women who will decide a verdict — and potentially the outcome of the 2024 election.
And that’s where Coley is really worried. Two of the jurors, he said, are attorneys.
They’re the kind of people who know the law, and the Trump jury might just have gotten one or two who think too much about whether Bragg has proven that a law was actually broken — and whether Trump was the one who did it.
Check out the video here:
Do you think Trump will be convicted in Manhattan?
Coley, a veteran Democratic operative who served in communications for Attorney General Merrick Garland’s Justice Department from 2021 to 2023, acknowledged he was speaking a little “tongue in cheek.” But his worry was clearly very real.
“I do worry that there are lawyers on this jury, not one but two lawyers,” Coley told Jonathan Lemire, host of the 5 a.m. program. (It’s not called “Way Too Early” for nothing.)
“And by my own experience, lawyers can sometimes be overly analytical. They can be hyper-technical. I worry that the nonlawyers on this jury may rely on the lawyers who, quite frankly, don’t have expertise in this area of the law.”
As an admission of the weakness of Bragg’s case, it’s astonishing as astonishing as it is damning.
What Coley is really saying is that “overly analytical” lawyers might dilute the anti-Trump emotion prosecutors are counting on to poison the jury’s deliberations.
What he’s saying is that a “hyper-technical” reading of the law — in this case, basically, a reading of the law as anything other than a vehicle to railroad a political opponent of the administration in power — could be fatal to the prosecution’s plan.
As one social media user wrote: “Cause most lawyers see this as a sham?”
Cause most lawyers see this as a sham?
— Jenny (@LuckyOptimist) May 27, 2024
And remember, Coley is no liberal-lawyer-with-a-conscience type, a la George Washington law professor Jonathan Turley.
Coley is a guy who left a high-ranking government job in the Merrick Garland Justice Department to become one of the foremost spokesman for Trump Derangement Syndrome in the United States.
He’s written that Judge Juan Merchan should feel free to jail Trump for violating his “gag order” (it’s couched in the usual high-flying language of equality under the law, but his meaning is clear).
He’s given a rave review to Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis and her disgraceful appearance on the stand last year to defend her own even-more-disgraceful abuse of power and taxpayer dollars in a romantic relationship with a man she put on the team prosecuting Trump in her jurisdiction.
It was a performance that the judge in her case couldn’t fully stomach, but Coley was all in.
And now he’s worried that two members of the Trump jury in Manhattan might know enough about the law to realize that Bragg’s case against the former president is essentially empty.
Coley tries to bluff that out by telling Lemire that the lawyer jurors don’t have “expertise” in the area of law involved, but if that’s the case, laymen jurors certainly don’t. It’s the prosecution’s job to convince them. Clearly, Coley is afraid that hasn’t happened.
To be clear, every Trump supporter should know that the chances of a Trump acquittal in a Democratic venue like Manhattan are minimal — not impossible, but minimal.
The prosecution has been blatantly political since its beginning, and it’s taking place in one of the most politically hostile climates available to Trump in the country (now-President Joe Biden got 86 percent of the vote in Manhattan, according to The New York Times).
And it’s being presided over by a Trump-loathing judge who’s delivered a whole circus so devoid of fairness that the courtroom proprieties are more suited to the ceremonial slaughter of a bullfight than an actual adversarial process of justice in an American court of law,
Yet even amid all that, a rabidly anti-Trump legal analyst is worried that the actual law itself might aid the former president, because two members of the jury might know too much about it.
The outcome of the Trump trial could well be a harbinger of the November election. While most Americans no doubt expect a conviction (65 percent of those polled by USA Today in early May), how that would affect him politically is an open question. If in the miraculous case that Trump were acquitted, it could well be a blow Democrats couldn’t recover from.
No wonder Coley is so worried.
