Nancy Gertner

this was a move that, in my view, is so far from constitutional that no judge worthy of their name would ever rule in a different direction.

I would call it a coup.

If it succeeds, it will have been a coup.

This is just pushing back on the judiciary, and then, when the judiciary does what they don’t want them to do, and the judiciary says this is wrong, trying to delegitimize that decision.

this is power, it seems to me, that is baked into the Constitution and cannot be taken away.

The notion that this justice would do this at this time following January 6th, given the fact that the Supreme Court, the opinions of the Supreme Court have plummeted, really is a in-your-face, you can't touch me and I don't care.

What is interesting about what she said, though, is that she's kicking all of this to the trial itself. And the trial could well be a mess, allowing Trump to raise defenses that really no one else would be allowed to raise and essentially…

There is just none. There's no conceivable basis for that.

the classified information that is being described is not and can't possibly be shielded by executive privilege. In other words, he didn't have a right to have it, he didn't have a right to have it in his beach house.

the notion that after this kind of behavior, the President can claim now, I'm sorry, I didn't realize what was in my basement, it makes absolutely no sense.

I don't think there's any question that he himself is under investigation for violations of the Espionage Act.

But what's troubling is the not so much the fact that the jury reached this verdict, but the implications of it.

We've got a really serious problem if a teenager is going to basically, you know, supplant the police because the police aren't doing enough.

Attacks on the judiciary by our President undermine that legitimacy and that faith.

Threatening a federal judge is a crime.

This is unequal at the start. And there's no outside context. I can't emphasize enough how unusual it is to simply have people, you know, confront their accuser with no other evidence other than essentially their own words.