Donald Trump’s birthday arraignment – ABC Radio

Sam Hawley: Hi, I’m Sam Hawley, coming to you from Gadigal Land. This is ABC News Daily. In the US, Donald Trump’s marked his 77th birthday, but we can only imagine what sort of celebration it might have been a day after he was arraigned in a Miami court. He’s pleaded not guilty to charges relating to the mishandling of classified material, some of which he kept in a bathroom at his Florida home. Today, legal analyst Jill Wine-Banks, who was one of the prosecutors during the Watergate scandal, on the case against the former president, and whether a jury would really convict him.

Jill Wine-banks, every time I speak to you, I’m sort of scratching my head about what’s going on in American politics. And once again, there’s been an extraordinary day in America….

Donald Trump, former US President: Today we witnessed the most evil and heinous abuse of power in the history of our country….

Jill Wine-Banks: Well, I guess every time I talk to you, I’m embarrassed because of what’s happening in America, because we never talk about the good things….

Donald Trump, former US President: This day will go down in infamy and Joe Biden will forever be remembered as the president who, together with a band of his closest thugs, misfits and Marxists, tried to destroy American democracy….

Jill Wine-Banks: We’re talking about the extraordinary criminal things. Today was the first time in our history that a president has been federally indicted, and previously had been indicted by the state.

Sam Hawley: Two times in about two months….

Jill Wine-Banks: Exactly. There’s also some civil cases pending that are quite serious – he was just held liable for sexual assault on E. Jean Carroll and defamation…

Reporter: The jury in the civil case brought by former columnist E Jean Carroll found Donald Trump sexually abused her in the mid 1990s in a department store dressing room…

Jill Wine-Banks: It’s a serious set of events.

Sam Hawley: All right, Jill. So run me through this rather extraordinary day… Outside the federal court in Miami, there were large crowds… No conflicts, luckily. What happened when Donald Trump arrived? Just run me through this process that he underwent during the day.

Jill Wine-Banks: So, of course, he entered the building through an underground garage and was never out in the public. Once he entered the court, he was not subjected to a mugshot. They uploaded a stock photograph of him instead. And then he was brought into a courtroom where he was asked how he pled to the charges against him and he pled not guilty.

Sam Hawley: And then afterwards, Jill, he goes to a Cuban restaurant, which is an unusual move?

Jill Wine-Banks: Yes. It’s not just a Cuban restaurant… It is Versailles.

Donald Trump, former US President: Food for everyone! Food for everyone! (Cheers)

Jill Wine-Banks: …which is a very famous restaurant. It is also the place where the Bay of Pigs was planned, and that is something where America got involved in trying to help prevent the communist take over of Cuba….

Archival radio report: The assault has begun on the dictatorship of Fidel Castro…..

Jill Wine-Banks: It was some CIA agents, who later became the Watergate burglars, were involved in the Bay of Pigs, and it was planned at Versailles Restaurant….

Donald Trump, former US President: Okay. What do you think? It’s a rigged deal here. We have a rigged country. We have a country that’s corrupt….

Jill Wine-Banks: So I also can’t help but think that Donald Trump, who aspires to be a king and who decorates his residences in gold, also loved the fact that it’s named ‘Versailles’, and that it is painted in gold. But it is a way of reaching out to a very strong Republican constituency, the Cuban-Americans in Florida….

Donald Trump, former US President: Thank you, everybody. God bless. God bless you. Thank you!

Sam Hawley: He then returned to his golf club in New Jersey and he spoke again, Donald Trump, and it was pretty typical Donald Trump, I think we’ve heard it all before.

Jill Wine-Banks: We have heard it all before.

Donald Trump, former US President: They ought to drop this case immediately because they’re destroying the country….

Jill Wine-Banks: He’s accusing the prosecutors of being in a political witch hunt. He’s accusing them of being terrible human beings.

Donald Trump, former US President: Mine’s not such a nice person – mine’s a deranged lunatic. That’s the prosecutor that they gave. He has found nothing….

Jill Wine-Banks: There’s no picking on Donald Trump, because it’s Donald Trump.

Sam Hawley: So, Jill, let’s go into more detail now about the allegations against Donald Trump… There are 37 counts, in this indictment….

Jill Wine-Banks: Right, so to briefly summarise them, there are 31 counts that deal with the wilful retention of national defence information. And then he is charged with withholding documents and trying to persuade his attorney to hide documents. And he is also charged with corruptly concealing documents and another count of concealing a document in a federal investigation. And then there’s a scheme to conceal from the grand jury and the FBI, and making false statements.

Sam Hawley: Mhm. So he’s accused of retaining classified documents and then basically scheming to block the government’s efforts to retrieve them… To get them back. Some of these documents, Jill, were apparently stacked in a bathroom at his Mar-A-Lago estate…

Jill Wine-Banks: Yes, the pictures, they’re quite astounding. There was pictures of boxes in a ballroom at his club, which is a public place on the stage in the ballroom, there are pictures of the boxes in a chandeliered bathroom, some hidden behind a plastic shower curtain, some just sitting opposite the toilet itself….

Sam Hawley: And we’re talking about highly classified material here, aren’t we? It’s super, super, super secret.

Jill Wine-Banks: We are, yes. It’s at the highest level of classification, which means the mere disclosure of it could cause grave danger to our country. So, yes, it’s at the highest level of classification. And it also, in the indictment, it says that on at least two occasions he shared documents that were of this nature with people without the appropriate security clearance. So that’s a really even more egregious violation. This rises to the level of espionage, when you are sharing these documents with people who don’t have security clearance.

Sam Hawley: One of the documents, Jill, outlines the possibility of a US military attack on Iran. Yes, this is how serious it is….

Jill Wine-Banks: Yes. And and it also talks about the vulnerabilities of our country and of our allies. And to me, that just screams a dangerous thing because the last thing you want your enemies to know is what are your vulnerabilities? And that is some of the documents that he took.

Sam Hawley: Okay. So, Jill, what is Donald Trump saying? I can see there is a bit of conjecture about whether the documents were declassified or not – just tell me about that.

Jill Wine-Banks: Well, at some points he has claimed that he declassified them in his mind.

Donald Trump, former US President: If you’re the president of the United States, you can declassify just by saying ‘it’s declassified’, even by thinking about it….

Jill Wine-Banks: Or that whenever he took them out of a secure location, by very definition, he was declassifying them…

Donald Trump, former US President: There can be a process, but there doesn’t have to be. You’re the president. You make that decision. So when you send it, it’s declassified. We… I declassified everything….

Jill Wine-Banks: And then we have a tape of him basically countering his own defence, saying, ‘well, I’d like to show you this document that I’m rustling’ and making this kind of noise as he’s talking to these people. ‘I’d like to show it to you, but it’s classified and I can’t and I don’t have the power to declassify it anymore.’ So he’s basically saying months after he’s out of the presidency, ‘I still have classified documents, they aren’t declassified and I can’t show them to you, but I am sort of showing them to you because I’m waving them in the air’. So his defence, I would say, falls apart very quickly and should not be successful.

Sam Hawley: Okay, Jill, let’s turn now to the politics of this, because, of course, Donald Trump, he’s running again for the presidency, and not only that, he is the frontrunner, isn’t he, in the Republican race? What have his opponents or his rivals in that race had to say about these charges against Trump?

Jill Wine-Banks: Sadly, his opponents have said very little. Chris Christie, who has recently announced that he’s running for the Republican nomination, has criticised him.

Chris Christie, former Republican Governor of New Jersey: He took documents he wasn’t supposed to take. He kept them. When they asked him back for them, they got a grand jury subpoena. He refused to comply. Loser, loser, loser.

Jill Wine-Banks: Nikki Haley has almost but not quite criticised him.

Nikki Haley, former Republican Governor of South Carolina: If this indictment is true, if what it says is actually the case, President Trump was incredibly reckless with our national security.

Jill Wine-Banks: Most of them are being silent, and many of the leading members of Congress are saying, ‘well, we’ll just have to see.’

Sam Hawley: I gather these Republicans would be a little wary, as well, because this could actually help Donald Trump rather than hinder his bid, because I can see his support actually surged after his first arraignment, unbelievably.

Jill Wine-Banks: It did. It surged, and he raised a lot of money on the false claim that he needed the money to defend himself. When we know from past experience that he does not use the money for that purpose. I think in a court of law, the fear is, number one, it only takes one MAGA supporter, a ‘Make America Great Again’ Trump supporter, in court to say ‘I refuse to convict him, I will never be convinced that he’s guilty’, and that would lead to a hung jury and a retrial. The other risk right now is that the judge, Eileen Cannon, so she has displayed an extreme bias in favour of Donald Trump. During the trial, she can do several things that could seriously impede the trial. She can grant a lot of delay. And of course, justice delayed is often justice denied. She can create jury instructions that are very negative to the prosecution and very favourable to the defendant. I think the dangers are quite serious.

Sam Hawley: So, Jill, it sounds to me that you’re pretty sceptical that Donald Trump will be convicted. What is your prediction? What do you think’s going to happen?

Jill Wine-Banks: No, no, I am not. I am a possibly Pollyanna because I believe that a jury will pay attention to the evidence in the courtroom, that they will follow the jury instructions that say ‘you must make your decision based only on the evidence presented in court, not your pre-existing views’, because the evidence in the indictment is so strong and so clear.

Sam Hawley: Jill Wine-banks is a former US federal prosecutor, MSNBC legal analyst and author of ‘The Watergate Girl’. If you want to know more about how Donald Trump was found liable for sexually abusing writer E Jean Carroll, we covered that on the 11th of May, and that’s in your feed. This episode was produced by Veronica Apap and Sam Dunn, who also did the mix. Our supervising producer is Stephen Smiley. I’m Sam Hawley. ABC News Daily will be back again tomorrow. You can find all our episodes of the podcast on the ABC Listen app. Thanks for listening.