Legal expert flattens Trump team’s latest ploy: 'We just went through a trial about that'
When the Wall Street Journal published a report earlier this month claiming it had spoken with Democrats regarding President Joe Biden's mental decline, the paper faced backlash from The White House, veteran journalists like Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough, and others.
According to Deadline, Biden representatives slammed the WSJ for including only "one on-the-record Republican source, former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, to claim that the president is slipping."
During the latest episode of MSNBC's Deadline: White House Monday, host Nicolle Wallace spoke with former FBI counsel and legal analyst Andrew Weissmann and discussed the conservative newspaper's clear bias towards former President Donald Trump.
READ MORE: 'Garbage Murdoch paper lying again': Critics call out NY Post over deceptively edited video of Biden
"The situation that I find the most vexing is that the things that Trump is saying about how he's going to tell [Russian President Vladimir] Putin to release [WSJ journalist] Evan Gershkovich when he's president are so cruel and so sickening."
Wallace added, "The fact that Trump has weaponized what will now be a show trial for Putin — he's going to be tried on espionage charges — the fact that there are no breakers in the circuits for the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal, that there's no pride in what that paper is and does, really is a stunning sort of mile marker in that paper's evolution."
Weissman replied, "I have two words for everyone: David Pecker. We just sat through a trial where the jury found beyond a reasonable doubt with no cross-examination of any import of David Pecker, a friend of Donald Trump's to this day, the head of the National Enquirer, where he talked about — it wasn't just a catch and kill scheme."
The former FBI attorney emphasized, "There were two parts to this scheme: One part was to catch and kill bad stories about Donald Trump, and the other part was to create false stories for a political candidate. And those false stories were first run by the political candidate. That is David Pecker's testimony under oath about what he agreed to with Donald Trump."
READ MORE: David Pecker believed he was killing unflattering stories about Trump 'for the campaign'
Regarding the WSJ’s owner Rupert Murdoch, Weissmann continued, "That is just the new day David Pecker. And if you want to know that these are fake stories that are coming out and being propagated, we just went through a trial about that. Where the jury heard it and found — remember, that was why it's a felony, is that they believed David Pecker that there was this agreement. And so, you don't need to look very far and you don't need to sort of surmise what's going on with Donald Trump. He did this already."