Conservative attorney John Yoo is not feeling sorry for Donald Trump after a jury awarded E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million in defamation damages.
[Note from Ellen: Yesterday, I wrote about how Special Report spun the E. Jean Carroll verdict. I also noted that Brian found not a mention of the case on Fox’s The Five show, which aired not long after the verdict was reached. But the Your World show, which was airing when the verdict came down, discussed it in a way he and I found pleasantly surprising. This segment further cemented the show as a small, non-MAGA corner at Fox. The rest of this post is by Brian, with some editing by me.]
“Think of it this way,” John Yoo said about the verdict. “Every time Donald Trump wants to insult Jean Caroll, he's going to have to write a $40 million check for each sentence. That's how bad this is.” He said “the whole point” of the enormous, unprecedented damages award was "to tell Donald Trump to shut up.”
Yoo also blasted Trump’s lawyers for not reining him in. “I can't believe his lawyers haven't succeeded in just telling him look, campaign for president, run for president, make your accusations about a two-tiered Justice system, but leave this alone. Stop attacking people who are no longer public citizens. Stop attacking people you've already lost, and the court has already said what you've done is liable,” Yoo added. “Because every time he insults her again, he's going to have to cut another $20-30 million check."
There was another message in the damages award, Yoo said, and that is that Trump "has to stop disrespecting the justice system."
Yoo later said that Trump has “wrapped up the primary” by using the numerous judicial proceedings against him as a campaign forum to attack the Biden administration’s Department of Justice. But in a general election, Yoo said Trump will need to ask himself, "Do these kinds of antics, which were popular in the primary, gonna serve him with the independents and even some unhappy Democrats that he needs to win to win the general election, or are they going to be turned off by seeing him continue to insult the woman and getting a $20-30 million fine from a jury every time he opens his mouth about it?"
You can watch the analysis below, from the January 26, 2024 Your World.
The nice thing about 3-year olds is that most of them learn, eventually. It’s far too late for DJT.