MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell claimed on Tuesday that former President Donald Trump had “a bribe sitting on the defense table” for the judge hearing his federal criminal case.
“There’s a bribe sitting on the defense table,” O’Donnell said before Trump gave a speech at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club. “There is a Supreme Court nomination, when Donald Trump becomes president if you, madam justice, help me become president again, here it is. You couldn’t have a bigger, more horrible incentive on a defense table sitting in front of a Republican judge.”
Trump entered a plea of “not guilty” to all counts during his arraignment on Tuesday, after the special counsel secured a grand jury indictment on 37 counts, including violations of the Espionage Act, that was unsealed on Friday.
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United States District Judge Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed to the federal bench in May 2020, will reportedly preside over the case. Cannon ordered the appointment of a special master to review documents seized during the Aug. 8 raid on Mar-a-Lago, the Florida estate Trump owns, but the ruling was later overturned on appeal.
“She gets appointed right at the end of Donald Trump’s tenure, when he is on his way out,” MSNBC host Joy Reid said earlier, while claiming Trump “introduced a certain kind of poison into the system.”
O’Donnell claimed that judicial ethics would require Cannon to recuse herself from hearing the case.
“One question we forgot to ask in the Senate confirmation hearings is: ‘Will you preside over a criminal trial of the president who appointed you?’” O’Donnell said. “And the answer is obviously, you must not.”
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