George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley on Friday criticized television anchors and legal commentators for celebrating the guilty verdict of former President Donald Trump.
A Manhattan jury on Thursday convicted Trump in the case brought by Democratic District Attorney Alvin Bragg on all 34 counts of falsifying business records. Turley said it was disheartening for him to witness this “celebration” after “Outnumbered” aired a compilation including MSNBC host Joy Reid, former U.S. attorney Harry Litman and MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, as well as Democratic politicians, with the law professor saying he would never celebrate a conviction. (RELATED: ‘Rigged’: Death Of The American Voter | WATCH NOW)
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“Some of the comments, they basically say, ‘this has completed me,'” Turley said. “You had one anchor that said, ‘I’ve been covering him for nine years and finally this has come.’ And you want to say, ‘if you were waiting to be completed by this conviction, that is a particularly a sad moment in your life.'”
“There is a dehumanizing aspect of talking about someone. I’m a criminal defense attorney and you will never ever see me celebrating a conviction, no matter who it is,” he added. “My kids would always joke on sentencing day when I would come back from the courts I would sit ’em all down and lecture them, ‘never get into a car with someone you don’t know, never get into a car with drugs’ and they’d say, ‘oh, it’s sentencing day’ because I would watch these young people going to jail. It’s a sick sort of fascination. People like to see people fall from great heights, but these are human beings and even if you don’t like Trump, it’s a pretty sad thing to celebrate.”
Weissmann on Wednesday said he had a “man crush” on Judge Juan Merchan.“With respect to Judge Merchan, I mean, I am, like, now — you know, I have like a man crush on him,” he said.
Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy on Thursday reacted to the verdict more somberly, saying the case was “political” and that Trump was unfairly targeted. McCarthy also expressed hope that the former president’s appeal will be more just than the trial.
“It’s a historic trial of a former president of the United States by his partisan adversaries. Whatever you think of the results, it’s inconceivable in New York that anyone else other than Donald Trump would ever have been indicted in this way by Alvin Bragg, the elected progressive democratic district attorney who campaigned on the fact that he would go after Donald Trump, that he had a history of going after Donald Trump,” he said. “This is a very political exercise.”
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