‘He Realizes He’s Going to Lose’: CNN’s Elie Honig Argues Trump is Attacking NY Judge To Set The Stage For An Appeal
Former President Donald Trump doubled down Monday on attacking the judge in his civil fraud trial in New York as he spoke to the press before entering the courtroom. Trump attacked the judge on social media earlier in the morning and CNN legal analysis Elie Honig was asked to weigh in on him doing it again as his trial officially began.
CNN anchor John Berman noted that Trump is “going after the judge. You heard him going after the attorney general in this case.”
Berman added, “And again, this is no longer a bug of the Trump campaign. This is the feature, the Trump campaign is the legal operation that he is facing right now.”
Berman noted that the judge in New York had already found on behalf of New York Attorney General Letitia James in a summary ruling and then asked Honig for his take. James is suing Trump and his adult sons for $250 million in penalties and seeking to bar them from doing business in the state for having fraudulently inflated the value of assets for over a decade, which the judge in the case has already ruled Trump is liable for doing.
“Yeah, for sure. And Donald Trump has put similar sentiments on his true social feed. It’s a counterintuitive strategy to openly attack the person who’s going to be rendering the verdict in this case, the judge,” Honig began, adding:
It seems to me Donald Trump’s strategy here is essentially damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead. He understands he’s not going to kiss up to this judge. He’s not going to try to please this judge. I think he realizes he’s going to lose. As John said, he already has lost the first count, the most important count.
I think he’s trying to make, A, a political appeal, B, I think his legal approach here is going to be his lawyers. They’re going to be hoping to set the stage for appeal, hoping that they can find something that was procedurally incorrect, find some sort of bias in the judge that will justify an appeal. But he’s leaning into this for sure.
“Can we just talk about what the words that he used, because he’s done this before, and every time he goes after the judge or the attorney general in saying that she’s racist, they get threats like this is actually dangerous for them every time he does it,” added anchor Sara Sidner.
“And I do think we have to call it out every time we get used to it, because he does it every single time. But there are real consequences to these statements,” Honig replied, adding:
They are, in my view, what we just heard is over the line. Look, you are allowed as a defendant in a criminal case or a civil case. You’re allowed to criticize the prosecutor, you’re allowed to criticize the other party. You’re allowed to criticize the judge. Again, query whether that’s a smart decision, but you can do that. But there is a line.
And when you get to the point of calling the attorney general a racist, when you get to the point of saying some of the things that I won’t repeat about this, AG about other prosecutors, about the judge, that becomes dangerous. And the question is, will either the prosecutors in any of these cases or the judges in any of these cases do anything about it? We see that starting to happen now in one of the criminal cases, the federal case in D.C., the judge is considering a gag order as we speak.
“And by the way, these statements that we’re hearing today probably aren’t going to help Donald Trump in arguing against that,” Honig concluded, referring to Special Counsel Jack Smith asking for a limited gag order in his federal case against Trump in Washington, DC.
Watch the full clip above.
