'One of the most intense court days': What Ari Melber saw inside Trump’s criminal trial

We’re hearing for the first time from inside the courtroom with MSNBC chief legal correspondent Ari Melber, host of The Beat, and he’s just made his way out. OK, give us your big takeaways, Ari Bonnie. Well, this was obviously one of the most significant patches of testimony we’ve had about the underlying incidents. You had defendant Trump sitting there in court as questions were asked about whether, as they put it in court, does Melania know, quote, UN quote, that he had this affair? Did this happen, quote, UN quote, during the marriage, referring to those texts as Keith Davidson, the lawyer for Karen McDougal, spoke to Dylan Howard, the tabloid senior publisher figure, about the nature of this story. So I think this was by far one of the the most intense court days for the defendant. And clearly from my view, just to tell you in the room, I could see the side of the defendants face as he kind of watched it. He largely looked composed or even nonplussed at times during what was obviously a striking or dramatic moment. I also had a view of the jury and while we’re careful about not describing them in detail, as a general matter, the jury appeared very attentive, very wrapped, very focused on what was a very eventful set of of facts or allegations put forward. And then we also had of course, as I think you were covering video of then candidate Trump played so the jury could take that in. So really it was, it was quite an active couple hours. Let me ask you too about the relationship as you viewed it, between Todd Blanche, his key lawyer, and Donald Trump himself, because there was a large story in the New York Times today about how Trump is getting frustrated. We’ve seen this before, right? In the past with Donald Trump. He wants his lawyers to do what he’s going to do. There’s this push and pull. How do you appease your client but also do what you think is going to get your client acquitted? Did you see anything telling between two of them? Well, they were conversing almost like normal. Today is how I would describe it. This is, as you know, a defendant who’s much more active. We have a problem. In turn, I have a problem here. I can hear you. Can you hear me? All right, I’m going to keep going. I heard Chris ask about the microphone, but I’m being told that can be heard hopefully. I was going to say we could see defendant Trump who’s much more active than most defendants in the legal setting, speaking, having sidebars. At one point. I could see his lawyer Blanche kind of covering his mouth so that the internal cameras that are used inside the court might not pick up anything. But he was having back and forth with defendant Trump. And we also could see, again from inside the courtroom, Mr. Trump going up and down the aisle in both times. And he, he looked very stern, as he has in other days, but perhaps one might say he looked particularly stern today. So we would see those kind of interactions with his lawyers and and Blanche was doing the normal stuff today. I mean, they had stuff in front of the jury, but they also had stuff without the jury talking about planning and scheduling. And so to the extent that we’re kind of looking for Tea Leaves about their relationship, it didn’t seem to me like an abnormal day for their interactions. Let me go back to the jury if I can, for a second. And we’re going to talk more about this going forward, which is sort of the story that you have to build as a prosecutor, right. And the fact that they brought in a couple of people that maybe they didn’t need to, they could have just said, the defense could have said, you know what? We’re going to say, it’s OK. You don’t need to bring the guy in from C-SPAN. We’re going to allow accept this to come in, but is there any point at which you saw the jury lost attention sometimes when you start talking about things like documents and people who are on who are not as exciting maybe as the other folks have been, do the jurors seem engaged and are they still taking notes? They’re taking notes. They did appear engaged and that seemed to be the case for both of sort of the morning sessions, the first session and then the post break session where we had that more dramatic testimony about the dealings with with McDougal about the quote UN quote affair and those questions and those old texts. So I didn’t detect again from watching, I had a pretty clear view from the 2nd row of the jury. I didn’t detect them totally tuning out. That said, you’re absolutely right that as cases drag on, the whole reason that sometimes you come to stipulations with the other side is to avoid doing what you did today where you sort of have someone from C-SPAN, which all of our viewers know we love C-SPAN. But you have someone there really for chain of custody purposes saying yes, this is really the right tape. Yes, this really is that Donald Trump. And if the jury doesn’t know, they don’t know why it’s getting so boring, right. They don’t know the necessary the back story that but they’ve been obstructed by the judge. And in my experience, jurors tend to follow this when the judge says, hey, there are reasons we’re doing this. They relate to accuracy and fairness. We’re not trying to waste your time. The judges put it in more formal language. But basically, yeah, we got to have these people in. So you know the video you’re looking at, the text you’re looking at. This is all legit.