Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann said on Tuesday that Donald Trump did himself absolutely no favors with his botched answer to what should have been a “softball” question in his civil fraud trial.
When Trump was asked if he could say if all his financial statements were true and accurate, Weissmann said the former president basically replied: “I’ll get back to you.”
“That should be a softball,” Weissmann told MSNBC’s Joy Reid. “Joy, if I asked you, ‘Did you ever file things with a bank that are true and accurate?’ You’d be like, ‘I don’t even remember what they are, but of course I did.’”
Weissmann added, “I mean, like it’s a softball, and he couldn’t just say, ‘Of course, that’s the case,’ and I think it’s because he was thinking, ‘Well, I know they’re not, so I don’t actually want to lie about that.’”
Weissmann also predicted how Trump’s “acting out” in court could backfire.
Judge Arthur Engoron has to decide if Trump “can continue to do business in the state of New York,” he said.
“If you’ve got someone who is so unrepentant, who is so out of control, who so much doesn’t care about the rule of law, it seems to me that the judge could easily weigh in on his conduct here to say, ‘You know what, this is not the kind of person, a recidivist, who we want to have preying on people in New York.’”
The former president “hurt himself substantively and in terms of his behavior,” added Weissmann.
Watch Weissmann’s analysis here: