The cast of characters that made up the Thursday edition of Deadline: White House were provided the opportunity to give MSNBC’s first response to the news that former President Donald Trump had been convicted in New York. Host Nicolle Wallace and panelists Rachel Maddow and legal analyst/former Mueller probe prosecutor Andrew Weissmann all reacted by waxing poetic about democracy’s “shining moment” and how it withstood attempts by Trump and his allies to delegitimize the rule of law.
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Later, Weissmann tried to hail the verdict as not just a victory for the rule of law, but a foreign policy victory as well, “Jurors take it so seriously. And yes, it can be scary because of it, but, you know what, they did their job and I think that this is a testament to our joining so many other democracies in the international community who have managed to hold political leaders to account and we have shown we can do that as well in a fair process where the defendant got extremely good counsel, an incredibly fair process from this judge, in spite of his attacking the witnesses, the judge, the judge's family, the jurors.”
Further along in the program, Weissmann took a shot at the case’s critics, “Just to be clear, the attack on the rule of law is also something you have seen, which is the attack on journalism, this is all of a piece that is undermining our institutions and then flipping the script to say that somehow this is a nation in decline. No one can be happy today, but this is a day of seeing the rule of law.”
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