Minds around that we would like to project on israel the kind of government we would like there to be in israel. We have the government that there is. Netanyahu is beholden to the most far right elements ever in a coalition and that is the reality staring us in the face. Ben rhodes, thank you for your time. That is our show for this evening. Now it is time for last word with lawrence odonnell. Good evening, alex. It was a shorter day in the courtroom, but an important day in the courtroom. Everyone at the table was in the courtroom today. The regular gang, lisa rubin, andrew weissmann. We are done now. The evidence is in. We can make evaluations about where the evidence stands in a more important way tonight than before. And important questions i am sure they will have thoughts on that the judge will have to answer in the coming days. Have a good show. Well, at 10 11 a. M. Today Donald Trumps lead criminal Defense Lawyer todd blanche stood and said, your honor, the defense rests. The truth was, there was no defense. The team of highpriced Trump Defense lawyers are actually paid by the deluded people who send in contributions in response to Donald Trumps relentless begging for money from people he promised he would never ask for money. When donald trump began his first president ial campaign his major Selling Point to voters was he was so rich you could pay for his own campaign and therefore was incorruptible and would never ask them or anyone else for money. Then donald trump proceeded to never spend a penny of his own money on his president ial campaign. He loaned his first president ial campaign some money at the beginning, but of course the Campaign Paid him back through the donations of those poor, deluded people who send money to a liar who promised he would never ask for money and now their money has gone to a highpriced legal team who could not come up with any defense at all in Donald Trumps first criminal trial. They came up with conflicting Defense Theories that they offered in crossexamination questions of some of the witnesses who testified for the prosecution, but an actual defense in a criminal case is not measured by questions Defense Lawyers ask in Cross Examination. Those questions are not evidence. Next week when judge merchan is instructing the jury, he will tell them that lawyers questions are not evidence. Witnesses answers are evidence. And so the Trump Defense presented no evidence. None. In defense of donald trump against the crimes he is charged with. None, no defense. The first witness they called was a technical witness who did not add any evidence or information to the case whatsoever. A young, Paralegal Assistant who works for the Trump Defense team who had created a spreadsheet of a list of phone calls. That was it. His testimony took only a few minutes and the document he created was accepted as an exhibit in the case and that was that. And then yesterday the Trump Lawyers, possibly at the insistence of donald trump, made what every fairminded observer of the trial has called the grotesque mistake of calling criminal lawyer Robert Costello, whose Chief Currency as a criminal lawyer, judging by his emails exposed in this trial, is that he is a close friend of the deranged rudy giuliani. Rudy giuliani was Robert Costellos boss in the 1980s when giuliani was the manhattan u. S. Attorney and costello was a federal prosecutor working for giuliani. His turn under oath yesterday was the witness Stand Equivalent of drunk driving. At this hour last night i read you the full transcript of what judge merchan did when Robert Costello decided to vocally disagree with the judges ruling on objections while he was sitting on the Witness Stand. The Transcript Entry that we, in the courtroom all heard, shows Robert Costello saying the chosen spelling by the court reporter. That is what we heard. I could hear it in the last row of the courtroom yesterday and none of us in the courtroom had ever seen anything like that or heard anything like that, especially from a witness who is a lawyer and should know better, much better. Judge merchan was shocked. He leaned forward. He asked costello to repeat himself, to Which Costello said strike it, which is lawyer talk for nevermind what i just said. Then as we found out later the judge saw costello continue to signify his irritation with and disrespect for the judge in ways that we could not quite see from the audience and the judge ordered the courtroom cleared so he could talk about it directly to costello. Clear the courtroom. Words no one in that courtroom had ever heard before, before the judge said that, including the Court Officers. They had never had to do that before. With everyone out of the courtroom we learned later in the transcript that was kept of what happened when we were out of the courtroom, judge merchan said to costello, sir, your conduct is contemptuous right now. I am putting you on notice that your conduct is contemptuous. If you try to steer me down One More Time i will remove you from the stand and strike the entire testimony, do you understand me . Mr. Bove, yes judge, i understand. When he said yes i understand, he and the rest of the legal team also fully understood what a catastrophic mistake it was to put an Uncouth Buffoon on the Witness Stand as a Defense Witness for an Uncouth Buffoon. At 9 29 a. M. Today, Robert Costello, the red faced, whitehaired 76yearold criminal lawyer entered the courtroom again to resume Cross Examination by assistant District AttorneySusan Hoffinger, who the day before costello had insulted by telling her to speak into the microphone. Ordering her to speak into the microphone, when she was already speaking into the microphone and everyone in the courtroom could hear her. That was a moment that no doubt helped expose more of the ugly essence of Robert Costello to the jury of seven men and five women. When the jury entered the courtroom three minutes after the witness this morning, the community of the courtroom that the jury had come to know so well had changed dramatically. The presence of armed Court Officers who have been the most courteous and helpful guides to all of us, taking our places in that courtroom every day, had more than doubled. Where there used to be one Court Officer standing in the center aisle, there were three. At the back of the room where there used to be two, there were four. There were more highranking officers in the room than we had ever seen at one time. One of the courts administrative officials who had been especially helpful to members of the news media and who was rarely in the courtroom was now standing in the back of the courtroom observing everything. This dramatic demonstration of extra control of the courtroom by the Court Officers was completely lost on the Defense Lawyers and defendant and prosecutors, because they had their backs to that part of their room. They were facing front, where they could see the judge and the witness and some of the jury, but the jury could see everything in that room. The jury could look and see at least double the amount of those friendly Court Officers who they have come to know. More than double of those Court Officers than they had ever seen in that courtroom before and the jury could not know why. They had been sent out of the room by the judge yesterday the first time the judge decided to, as he put it, speak directly to Robert Costello about what the judge called the decorum in the courtroom. It was only when costello continued his disrespectful Courtroom Conduct that the judge cleared the courtroom of all of the rest of us. The reporters, everyone else in the room, and the judge had a more private, oneonone with costello while the lawyers were still present. The jury could not know that this huge, new show of force and control in the courtroom this morning was all because of the contemptuous conduct of the only witness, Donald Trumps team brought into that courtroom to offer actual testimony in this case. And his testimony had absolutely nothing to do with the crimes donald trump is charged with. Robert costello was one of the lawyers who the prosecutions star witness, Michael Cohen, consulted after the fbi executed Search Warrants at his home, the hotel room where he was temporarily living, and his office. When Michael Cohen became a cooperating witness and the fbi investigation, it eventually led to Michael Cohen pleading guilty to crimes, including Crimes Involving the payoff to Stormy Daniels, which Michael Cohen said was done at the direction of donald trump. Under crossexamination today it became clear that Robert Costello was eager to become Michael Cohens lawyer, so eager that he wrote an email to his son boasting about how he was on the verge of becoming the Defense Lawyer for, quote, the personal attorney to donald j. Trump. He told his son, quote, i will be on the team. The trouble is, his emails revealed that the team was bigger than Michael Cohen. In crossexamination it became clear that Michael Cohen was not Robert Costellos primary interest. It is customary for lawyers to ask witnesses to read their own emails allowed as evidence. Assistant District AttorneySusan Hoffinger tried that yesterday on crossexamination, but costello could not do it, he could not read his own emails without constantly inserting new editorial comment on his own emails, so today Susan Hoffinger read the emails herself. Can you please blow up the last paragraph, please, in yellow . Then she read Robert Costellos email to his law partner. Quote, our issue is to get cohen on the right page without giving him the appearance that we are following instructions from giuliani or the president. In my opinion this is the clear, correct strategy. That is not a strategy to help Michael Cohen. Yesterday when the District Attorney asked Robert Costello to interpret one of his emails, costellos answer was that the email, quote, speaks for itself. And so today, after reading that email that i just read to you, District Attorney said, question, as you said yesterday, the email speaks for itself, correct . Answer. Sometimes. And it got worse for Robert Costello. District attorney hoffinger quoted another email to his partner about Michael Cohen. This is a quote from the email. What should i say . He is playing with the most powerful man on the planet. Now that email certainly speaks for itself, does it not, mr. Costello . Answer, yes it does. It is clear that costello was interested to be not on the team of Michael Cohen, but the team of the man who costello thinks of as the most powerful man on the planet. The man sitting across the room from Robert Costello in the defendants chair. Robert costello left the Witness Stand in disgrace at 10 11 a. M. This morning after 42 minutes on the Witness Stand this morning, establishing absolutely nothing. For Donald Trumps defense against the criminal charges of falsifying new York Business records in order to illegally help his 2016 president ial campaign. The judge then explained the Scheduling Dilemma he faced. He told the jury that he likes to keep the final arguments by the defense and prosecution together so that they are not separated by a day or a weekend and that he would need additional time to prepare his legal instructions for the jury, so he pointed out that because they were already scheduled not to meet wednesday of this week, that the earliest they could begin the lawyers summations without having to break them up would actually be sometime maybe on thursday of this weekend that might not allow everything to be completed before the memorial day weekend or he would send the jury into deliberations at the end of the day on friday, so the best way for the judge to handle it, he decided, was to send the jury off today into what will become memorial day weekend and that happened after the last witness today when costello left the Witness Stand. The judge then spent the afternoon considering arguments from both sides about what should be included in the judges instructions to the jury that will probably be delivered next wednesday, the day after the lawyers make final arguments to the jury on tuesday, which will of course be the day after the holiday, memorial day. So here we are. The case is in. There will be no more evidence. The prosecution has presented evidence to support every element of the crimes donald trump faces in the courtroom. The jury of 12 manhattan residents will begin deliberating next week. On the question of whether the evidence presented by the District Attorney amounts to proof beyond a reasonable doubt that donald trump committed those crimes. There is nothing about the jurors themselves that gives you the slightest hint about how they might be leaning in the case or what evidence they think is important, but they are always very attentive to everything in that room, especially judge merchans instructions and they will surely be very attentive when the judge delivers the last words they will hear before they begin deliberating in this case. The judge has said that he hopes to keep his instructions to about an hour or less and this afternoon in a hearing without the jury present, lawyers on both sides argued about what those instructions should be. It did not go well for the trump criminal Defense Lawyers. They brought up something that the judge had ruled out of the case a very long time ago. Long before the trial began and this was frustrating for the judge. Judge merchan said look, this is an issue that has been going on for a very, very long time. I wrote a decision on this and my decision is dated february 7. That decision directed the defense to provide notice of disclosure of your intent to rely on the defense of advice of counsel by march 11, 2024, and to produce all discoverable statements and communications within his possession and control by the same day. What that means is the judge told the Trump Defense team, if youre going to use the my lawyer made me do it defense, you have to tell us before the trial, because there are many evidentiary requirements for making that defense. The defense would essentially be i just followed the advice of my lawyer, Michael Cohen. There are technical requirements for making that legal defense, which Donald Trumps lawyers chose not to do. And so when his mounting frustration this afternoon the judge said, later on, the defense on advice of counsel moved into, morphed into something called the presence of counsel, which i had never heard of and i was not familiar with, but i addressed it and the motions and at that time i indicated that you are precluded from arguing this legal claim of presence of counsel. There was no such thing. It is just a way to get around having to turn over documents related to the advice of counsel. Now this term, presence of counsel, has morphed yet again into something called involvement of counsel. My answer has not changed and honestly i find it disingenuous for you to make the argument at this point. Bove attempts to get up at that point and the judge says, please dont get up. I let you speak, let me speak. All right. It was concerning when the term was changed to presence of counsel. I couldnt believe when i saw it again, calling It Involvement of counsel and i understand the argument that you are making. Im telling you my ruling is the jury will not hear that instruction from the