CNN anchors call out Trump's inner circle for trying to intimidate the judge in Trump's criminal case
John King: “Donald Trump Jr. just tweeted a picture of the judge's daughter ... This is how they play. They try to intimidate, they attack, and they put at risk people who should not be dragged into this process.”
Published
Citation From the April 4, 2023, special edition of CNN's The Arrest and Arraignment of Donald Trump
JOHN KING (CNN ANCHOR): And he's forced today to live in reality. We're reading body language right now. Pretty soon, we'll get to read an indictment. That's the most important thing that will happen today, seeing what's actually on paper and what they can lay out, to Carrie's point about how do they connect the dots here. But reading his body language, this is a man – Andy mentioned CEOs in court, average Joes in court. But this has to be a thud for him because he lives in a fantasy land.
He's going to go back to Mar-a-Lago tonight, where he has an office that he made deliberately to look like the Oval Office, where they have napkins with a seal that looks like the presidential seal. He calls his plane Trump Force One, he insists that everybody call him "Mr. President." He says that Joe Biden lost the election and that he should have been reinstated already. He's not in that world anymore. He's a defendant in a trial case right now.
One other point, I just want to make. I'm just looking at Twitter. Donald Trump Jr. just tweeted a picture of the judge's daughter, saying she worked for the Biden-Harris campaign, "seems [to be] relevant." It is not relevant. It is not relevant. She's an individual adult. But this is what – I was about to say, "this is the game they play." It's not a game. It's not a game. This is how they play. They try to intimidate, they attack, and they put at risk people who should not be dragged into this process. If Donald Trump is presumed innocent, if he can beat these charges, good for him. The judge's daughter has nothing to do with this, but this is what they do. This is how they have so taken this country off the rails and outside the norms.
DANA BASH (CNN ANCHOR): And there's a reason why they took the prosecutors’ pictures off the website for similar reasons, and it's really unfortunate that that is a world in which we live. And you have people on social media doing what you just described.
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JAKE TAPPER (CNN ANCHOR): Karen, I want to ask you a question and then throw back to Anderson. When somebody within the president’s, the former president's circle, like his son, or campaign, or people directly affiliated with him posts an image of the daughter of the judge at a time where political violence is increasingly becoming more and more normal and more and more accepted: Is that something that the judge could admonish the defendant and those in his immediate circle to not do? Or is that something that people just now accept as a modern reality?
KAREN FRIEDMAN AGNIFILO (CNN LEGAL ANALYST): No, that will not be accepted. That will not be OK.