President ial debate or in history has ever faced. Nothing even close to it and it is one that could create a gigantic challenge for joe biden. He may not be able to say anything about Donald Trumps indictments during these debates and that is a prospect no one has considered yet. Andrew weissmann will consider it for us in the discussion coming up. Lets talk about wednesday, the codeword, maybe. Ask if that is legal. Im going to be watching. We will check. Thanks, alex. Have a good show. Thank you. Donald trumps red necktie friends who alex was talking about came to the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse this week to praise one of the criminal defendants in the building and attacked District Attorney evan bragg, who donald trump falsely accuses of spending all of his time and resources on the prosecution of donald trump. People versus harvey weinstein. We are moving forward in that matter. We intend to retry it and those of you in court saw that the court set a window for a trial in the fall. So we are already moving forward with that matter. Having conversations with survivors, considering their wellbeing and pursuing justice. We are here now because the work of the office goes on in so many ways, as those of you who cover the office no the breadth of our work and that work continues. We have the expertise and resources to take on tough cases, while driving down crime, alongside our Law Enforcement partners. That includes over the past two years driving shootings down 40 in manhattan. Murders down 17 . Burglary down 31 and overall crime down 7 outpacing the citywide decline of 0. 6 . That is a tiny sample of the work that District Attorney evan bragg is doing every day with his team of more than 500 prosecutors, handling more than 35,000 active cases every morning. If those republican candidates for Vice President really support Law Enforcement, they would have come to new york to congratulate alvin bragg. Just when you thought a president ial debate that includes donald trump could not become more ridiculous, it has. President Joe Biden Will be debating donald trump with one hand tied behind his back, legally. Donald trump will, in the debate studio, will be claiming that every criminal prosecution donald trump faces is being run by joe biden. Donald trump says that every day. Everyone has heard that before and we will hear it again on the debate stage and the moderators will do nothing to contradict that, because in their traditional view that will be joe bidens job. Debate moderators will use the standard playbook of allowing the other candidate to answer accusations made by the opposing candidate, but what will joe biden be able to say about the prosecutions of donald trump . Maybe nothing. Because president s not named trump never comment on pending criminal cases. Prior to donald trump the most famous and possibly only instance we had of this was when Richard Nixon said in 1970 that Charles Manson was guilty of mass murder in the Hollywood Hills of actress sharon tate and seven other people. I know for example the coverage of the Charles Manson case when i was in los angeles. Front page every day of the papers. It usually got a couple of minutes in the evening news. Here is a man who is guilty, directly or indirectly, of eight murders without reason. The problem was Charles Manson wasnt guilty yet. President nixon said that in the middle of the Manson Family Trial and Criminal Defense Lawyers ask for a mistrial because of the president s on Flu Influence on the jury. Nixon made the statement before boarding Air Force One in denver to fly to washington and as soon as the plane landed, white house staff issued this Written Statement by the president of the United States. To set the record straight, i do not know and did not intend to speculate as to whether the defendants are guilty, in fact, or not. All of the facts in the case have not yet been presented. Defendants should be presumed to be innocent at this stage of their trial. The next day at the defense table, Defendant Manson held up for the jury a Los Angeles Times headline saying manson guilty, nixon declares. The New York Times reported one of the prosecutor said you could only assume that the manson Defense Counsel brought the paper in with his books and the District Attorney complained that the lawyers had done that and asked for the Manson Lawyers to be penalized for doing that and then while all of that was going on there was a very strong chance that there could be a mistrial in this case. The judge had to personally question each juror and the judge asked each juror to swear under oath that they would be able to reach a verdict based solely on the evidence presented in the courtroom. Joe biden remembers the two days in 1970 when the president of the United States almost derailed Charles Mansons murder trial. Everyone in high school or older in the United States at that time remembers. Joe biden is a more careful person and a more careful lawyer than Richard Nixon. Joe biden has not said anything about the overwhelming evidence against donald trump and the criminal charges he faces for violations of the Espionage Act And Illegal Possession of classified material. Joe biden has said nothing about the overwhelming evidence in the indictment of donald trump in washington, d. C. For conspiracy against the United States of america, Conspiracy To Defraud the United States of america by changing the a loads changing the results of the election. Joe biden has said nothing about georgia, where donald trump was recorded on the phone demanding that the Georgia Secretary Of State change the vote count in the election. Any other Candidate Running for president against donald trump could attack donald trump in a president ial debate on any one of those cases as long as the Candidate Running against donald trump was not the president of the United States. News coverage of donald trump has worn out the word unprecedented, but here we are tonight at the end of a full day of News Coverage of what will be the Biden Trump Debates and the news media still has not even realized how unprecedented those debates will be this time because of the criminal indictments facing donald trump. There will be a nominee in the debate facing at least three indictments who will already be convicted or found not guilty in an earlier trial happening now in new york city. If there is a hung jury and the District Attorney announces he is going to pursue a retrial on those charges, then joe biden wont be able to talk about that case either. A socalled debate that was already going to be ridiculous is going to be even more preposterous. It will be the theater of the absurd. Joe biden wont just have one hand tied behind his back, he will be put in a legal straitjacket and the unfair benefit to donald trump is enormous. Joe biden is a good lawyer who could rip up donald trump in a debate, just talking about the criminal indictments against donald trump alone. Instead, we will see the latest version of the standard tv debate format, which is already problematic to the point of absurdity. I have seen every televised debate in president ial history. That is how few of them there have been. Most president s were elected without debating anyone. That is how unnecessary president ial debates are. I was a little kid sitting on the floor of The Living Room in boston watching the very first televised president ial debate between Vice PresidentRichard Nixon and that austin boy, senator John Fitzgerald kennedy. I was in college the next time they had a president ial debate, 16 years later in 1976, between gerald ford and jimmy carter. Televised debates are not a mandatory part of president ial campaigning. They are a show created by and for television. They did not exist before television. No one thought they were necessary. The historically famous Lincoln Douglas debates were not president ial debates. They were debates for an Illinois Senate campaign, which Abraham Lincoln lost. The Television Version of debate doesnt actually test president ial skills and the rooms where president s govern, they are never told they only have two minutes to respond to what someone just said in that room. President s never have to make decisions alone. President s always have Expert Advice available to them, as much advice as they want or need. No one has ever run into the oval office and said mister president , you have 30 seconds to respond, never. And they never will. Nothing president ial is actually being tested in the phony debates that the Television Industry pretends are invaluable, because they are very good for the Television Industry. Candidates standing alone on the Debate Stage Answering questions about how they will govern is an entirely Fictional Television construct of how president s actually do their work. You dont need to remember everything about the tax code or the weight of missiles or Social Security trust funds all the time when your president. If a president struggles to remember a name or number in the oval office, no one snaps at him. No one panics. No one thinks the president is losing it. Every professional working with the president , a serious president , knows that every president not named trump has the largest range of governing information and responsibility in his head of anyone in that room. Everything from Agriculture Policy to the latest terrorist threat. If the faa director comes into the oval office to talk about the stress of overburdened air traffic controllers, the faa director expects to know and should know a lot more than the president knows about that particular subject. That is why he is there, to help the president. But if, say, when the faa director is walking into the oval office he sees the cia director leaving, the faa director should assume that shes talking to a president who might be distracted by something much more serious and darker that he just heard from the cia director, then what the faa director is therefore. But the Television Debate turns on the childish notion that the president is supposed to know everything all the time about everything and he is supposed to state the most important points about everything in two minutes to an audience that has a tiny fraction of understanding of what a knowledgeable, serious president knows. What you want is a president who can think and they almost never have to think quickly, so you want a president who can deliberate and think quickly. They absolutely never have to think alone. What you want is a president who demonstrated the ability to find the best choice in the agonizing president ial situations of having no good choice. None of the president ial debate moderators, all of whom are very good at their work, have ever seen a president ial decision made. They have never been in the room where that happens, when it happens. They have never seen a president ial decision on its way to being made. They have no idea how many weeks or years of thinking by the president and the people around him shape to that president ial decision that is announced to them in a White House Press briefing. That is in no way a criticism of the moderators announcement today for the debates, each of whom will do a better job than i could do in that situation. But there is nothing the moderators can do to fix the conceptual flaw in the notion of televised president ial debates. The flaw that was there at the birth in 1960 when the Television Business decided to pretend that the president ial debate could be a window into how the potential president would actually do his work. Joe biden started it all this morning with this. Donald trump lost to debates to me in 2020. Since then he has not shown up for a debate. Now he is acting like he wants to debate me again. Make my day, pal. I will even do it twice. Lets pick the dates, donald. I hear you are free on wednesdays. That was at 8 00 a. M. And joe biden announced ive received and accepted an invitation for a debate on june 27. Over to you, donald. As you said, anywhere, anytime, anyplace. Half an hour later donald trump accepted the june 27 cnn Debate Invitation and then an hour later donald trump posted on social media his accepting a september 10 invitation for an abc Television Debate. Two minutes later joe biden officially accepted the abc Debate Invitation and a tweet. The Biden Campaign laid down a set of conditions for debates this morning. Debates should be oneonone, allowing voters to compare the only two candidates with any statistical chance of prevailing in the Electoral College and not squandering debate time on candidates with no prospect of becoming president. The moderators should be selected by the Broadcast Hose from among their regular personnel so as to avoid a ringer or partisan. There should be firm time limits for answers and alternate turns to speak, so that the time is evenly divided and we have an exchange of views, not a spectacle of mutual interruption. A Candidates Microphone should only be active when it is his turn to speak, to promote adherence to the rules and orderly proceedings. Good luck with that. Leading off our discussion tonight is andrew weissmann, former chief of the Criminal Division of the Eastern District of new york. He is a msnbc legal analyst and coauthor of the bestselling book, the trump indictments. Thank you very much for joining us tonight. As soon as i heard about the debates this morning i began to wonder. I thought about Richard Nixon talking about Charles Manson, who you could not say was guilty if you were president of the United States and i started to wonder what, if anything, can the president of the United States in these debates say about his opponents indictments . Okay, so here is what i think is offlimits and here is what i think is within limits. I leave to others the strategic call about whether to do it. Looking at sort of what you can do. So, first, cases that have been, criminal cases and civil cases that have been concluded are clearly within the limits. Donald trump can be attacked or ask questions and joe biden can talk about civil fraud. Sexual assault. The Criminal Contempt. The 10 counts of Criminal Contempt that were found by the Sitting Judge right now. All of that is concluded, so all of that is fair game. Now there is a norm you referred to which is for ongoing criminal cases. There is a norm, not a law, but a norm that you should not talk about them and i am sure that joe biden is going to adhere to that. His whole point is the Department Of Justice should have its own separate being. It should make its own separate decisions and the president should not be directing who should be charged and who should not be charged and weighing in on those criminal cases. That is contrasts not just to Richard Nixon. I want to remind you of something that is a little bit close to me, which is when the Paul Manafort jury was out, donald trump had no problem weighing in on Paul Manafort and what a great guy he was and that is one of the 10 enumerated ways in which we suggested in the Mueller Report that was listed as one of 10 ways in which you could find Obstruction Of Justice by the then sitting president. So he does not adhere to those norms, but i do think