‘Old and tired and mad’: Trump’s demeanor in court detailed by Rachel Maddow
MSNBC host Rachel Maddow, inside Manhattan’s Criminal Courthouse on Monday, declared that Donald Trump appeared “old and tired and mad” as she delivered observations about the ex-president on trial for 34 counts of falsification of business records in the alleged pursuit of election interference to protect his 2016 presidential run.
Trump “seems considerably older, and he seems annoyed. Resigned, maybe, angry. He seems like a man who’s miserable to be here,” the journalist told MSNBC viewers Monday afternoon.
“I’m no body language expert,” she conceded, “and this is just my observation. He seemed old and tired and mad.”
The New York Times’ Susanne Craig, inside the courthouse Monday morning, reported: “Trump is struggling to stay awake. His eyes were closed for a short period. He was jolted awake when Todd Blanche, his lawyer, nudged him while sliding a note in front of him.”
The Biden campaign was only too happy to pick up and report Craig’s observation, adding “feeble.”
Former Obama senior advisor David Axelrod, pointing to his piece at The Atlantic, wrote of Trump: “He has charmed & conned, schemed & marauded his way through life. He was bred that way. But the weariness & vulnerability captured in courtroom images betray a growing sense in Trump that he could wind up as the thing his old man most reviled:
A loser.”Watch Maddow's video below.
GOP operative loses appeal of conviction for funneling Russian money to Trump campaign
A federal appeals court has upheld the conviction of a Republican operative who had been pardoned by Donald Trump in the waning days of his presidency.
The District of Columbia Circuit Court rejected an appeal by Jesse Benton, a former senior aide to Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell and Sen. Rand Paul, of his November 2022 conviction for orchestrating a scheme to conceal a $100,000 donation from a Russian national to his GOP consulting firm — and pocketing most of it.
Russian businessman Roman Vasilenko wired the money under his own name to the consulting firm, but Benton kept $75,000 for himself and gave $25,000 under his name to the presidential campaign for Trump, who posed for a photo with Vasilenko. Benton then filed a false report with the Federal Election Commission to conceal the source of the funds, the court found.
The Trump campaign was not aware of the true source of that donation.
Benton had appealed the conviction, saying Trump's 2020 pardon should have prevented the jury from hearing about his previous election crimes before convicting him of the newer charges.
ALSO READ: 11 ways Trump doesn’t become president
However, prosecutors argued that the unusual manner in which Trump handed out pardons by sidestepping the Justice Department's Office of the Pardon Attorney should have allowed them to present evidence of Benton's previous conviction for bribing an Iowa politician to switch his endorsement in 2011 to Ron Paul's long-shot presidential campaign.
The 45-year-old Benton, who is married to Ron Paul's granddaughter, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for that straw donor scheme.
— (@)
