The Chaser Report - How To Avoid Doing Jury Duty For Donald Trump

Episode Date: April 28, 2024

To return from their break with a bang, Dom and Charles take a look at how Donald Trump's jury was picked for one of his many criminal trials. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Charles, has it really been two weeks since we were last? We did do the special episode on Bruce Laman, which made me think actually looking at the numbers that we shouldn't go daily. We should just go like once a week when there's big enough news. Anyway, so a lot's happened during the two weeks.

Oh, it's been wonderful. I haven't really been paying attention. to the news. Has any big news happened in the last couple of weeks? As soon as we finished when went on the break, various bits of violence happened. Yeah, so that was horrible. That was an awful thing. I was a series of awful things actually that happened. Lots of awful things. But that's just like 2024, and 2023 and 2020. Like that's just reality. And then there's 2020 the worst year ever. Yeah, no, it's absolutely nightmarish. Just from a personal perspective, I feel like life is a lot better than it was two weeks ago.

Really? I feel refreshed, I feel optimistic. We've had a holiday. Yeah, I feel very relaxed. I have no idea what's going on. But I imagine everything's going ticotty boo. No, it's not. It's not at all.

Look, there are some bits of development. Benjamin Netanyahu is up on corruption charges. There's a very good episode of If You're listening with our friend Matt Bevan explaining how that all went down. It's really interesting. That's probably going to talk about another time. Let's talk about something that has been really fascinating while we've been away. Donald Trump's legal battles.

There are so many of them. I'm trying to remember the details without notes. So I'm probably going to get many of them wrong. I've brought notes. There have been so many court cases. In terms of the number, yeah. There's an extraordinary number of developments. Well, I think actually mathematicians have lost track of him.

Yeah, no, it's the largest number ever conceived of by a human brain. But we can say, Charles, that you will. will bring in some of the juiciest details of jury selection. This is where the fun stuff is. It's going to come in right after this. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore.

FIS is 100% online so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.C. Now, I completely admit that this happened about a week ago. Yeah, but the details, you might not have read the details. Let's just set the scene briefly by recapping the trials. So Donald Trump has many, many lawsuits on the go.

He's just lost an appeal for the defamation action where the writer E.gene Carroll sued Trump because he denied having sexually assaulted her. And the court thought that probably, that he had. So, in fact, very similar to the Bruce Lerman case. The Bruce Lerman of America. Except that in Donald Trump's case, it hasn't in any way affected his run for president. No. So he can expect Bruce Lohman to be Prime Minister within a number of years here in Australia.

So that's going on. The Supreme Court has been considering the question of whether presidents are completely unable to be sued for any breach of any criminal law. Can a president launch a coup or kill someone or just call in the army and roll in the tanks and be completely immune from prosecution. That's what the Supreme Court is considering. And so far, the indication has been that the Republican majority, would you believe, sympathetic to some aspects of Trump's argument?

Fucking hell. So we'll see how that plays out. The president becomes above the law. Well, I think they're not going to completely say, go and kill anyone you like. But I suspect the main thing is going to be delayed. They already do that at the moment. I don't think that's... I mean, Obama with the drones.

So it's going to be delayed, it seems very likely until Trump's president again and can just cancel. all the whole thing. That seems the most likely outcome there. I've got my eye on that because as America goes, so goes Australia, right? Yes, indeed. And my whole aim for the next 40 years of my life is to eventually become Governor General of Australia and then through some sort of odd twist of fate, accumulate enormous powers in that executive function.

Because I actually assume that the way we will actually become a republic is simply by just having an Australianly appointed Governor General by the Parliament. It'll just be a little admin thing that we do rather than any big change because Australians are completely ill-equipped for big change, at which point, the Governor-General, which is a very dictatorial, you know, powerful position. You've got the Reserve Powers. You can't you Commander-in-Chief when you're Governor-General? Oh, you get everything, I think.

And dismiss the government and calling the troops. And you're the General. Like, yeah, you can just sort of... Putting the General and Governor-General. Exactly. You can make your wife sing at events. I mean, it's just everything. That's true.

I would force my wife to sing at events. That would be awful. I wish you might be very good thing. It'd be like a Saddam Hussein style, you know, rule with an iron fist. I really like that for you, Charles, being Governor General and just going, Sir John Kerr didn't take this far enough. And I reckon I'd be able to impose my own level of aesthetic. You know how dictators are great dictators.

Yeah, they do. Kim Jong-Anne and, you know, makes everyone have the same. same haircut and, you know, Saddam Hussein. You know, there's one country, I think it might be Turkmenistan. I have to check my fact. Yes. There's one country where all the buildings are white. Yes.

With gold. Is that right? Like every single, you fly in and every building is just white. Yes. Whereas in my country, everyone would have to be pasty white. Yes, that's true. But, no, but the thing is, what I would do is I would impose a sort of brown coederoi aesthetic on the entire country by being the sort of dictator of Australia,

you don't get impressed. Oh, no, I'm just pondering what that would be like. So, look, podcast subscribers, can we say, when that happens, they'll get an advantage. Yeah, yeah, that's right. They'll have been early adopters of the Firth regime. Exactly. Get in now.

Get in now. So look, that's coming. The Supreme Court are going on. Meanwhile, in the state of Arizona, this is the state where there was the scheme to essentially ignore the electors who, Arizona voted for Biden, therefore the electors should have been Biden electors, but there was a scheme to replace them with Trump electors. Yep.

That has been moving along. I think a grand jury has found that they can progress. Well, I think they've charged about. Yes, many lawyers have been. Half a dozen people. They worked out who they were from the descriptions. A whole lot of Trump associates. So they're all rolling on.

But the most interesting one, Charles, is the hush money trial in New York State, in law Manhattan. Which has been now going on for a couple of weeks. And the best part, which admittedly happened about a week ago, but is so good that, you know, we have to do our first episode about it. This is pretty fantastic stuff. So just to recap this one, this is the one where it's a catch-and-kill scheme, essentially. What's going on is ahead of the election, Donald Trump allegedly went through and basically squashed all the negative stories. There was a woman called Karen McDougal, Playboy model, who he supposedly had an affair with.

David Pecker, the wonderfully named editor of the National Enquirer, bought the story and then didn't publish it. There was a doorman at Trump Tower who claimed he'd had a love child, and Pecker bought that and squashed that. No, it's not quite right. Oh, really? No, it's more hilarious and more incompetent than that, which is they set up a catch-and-kill scheme with the National Enquirer,

which at some level is in some ways completely legal to do, right? The idea that a sympathetic but completely independent newspaper catches a story and then goes, oh, our readers won't find, you know, an Andy Trump story tasteful. When would the National Inquirer print a love child story? Then we'd never do that. Exactly. It's beneath our ethical standards, right?

So it did that with one of the stories. But then by the time it got to the Karen McDougal story, which was the second one that they'd agreed to kill and capture, Trump had stumped them on the money for the first one because the whole idea was, well, and I'll pay you back. Like, you do this thing, and then I'll pay you back later on. All right. But by the second one, they'd already been stumped on the money. I love the word stumped.

It sounds like a Trump sexually encounter. Did you get stooped by that mushroom? And so what happened was, they started going, oh, well, I don't know whether we're going to do this. I do I want to do this. And so suddenly all this documentation started going back and forth about, well, this can't just be a handslet. Because Trump had sort of used the fact that, well, it was a hand. hands length, you know, arms length sort of thing, we never really agree anything. I don't want to think about a hands length. Yeah, like an arm's length thing. And that's because legally it had to be

to be legal, right? And so suddenly AMI started going, well, we want documentation. We want a contract that says, you will pay us back for catching and killing this thing. Because otherwise we're not going to get our money. And that's what they did with Karen McDowler. And that's what's unraveled the whole scheme. Oh, that's why Pecker's testifying. By the time it got to Stormy Daniels, they They weren't going to do it at all. And that's why they had to go direct. Michael Cohen. So Michael Cohen, who went to jail for this,

this is the thing that's so bizarre about this story. Yes. Is that Michael Cohen has already served time for this. For this very illegal act. And so Trump's being charged with it. Yes. What will happen? So 130 grand to Stormy Daniels.

Yes. To shut up about the affair that they supposedly had until after the election, basically, which is why she then came out with it with the Mario Mushroom fact that we all revealed it. Yes. And on the first day of the trials, Stormy Daniels dress. Did you see her dress?

No. She was dressed in a blue dress with a whole lot of mushrooms. A whole lot of mushrooms. A pattern. A mushroom pattern on it. It's very insensitive to the case in Victoria. But anyway, it's been absolutely fascinating. So the jury has to decide how plausible this is.

There's also been this extraordinary thing where they've tried to put a gag order on Trump. And Trump's basically gone out every day and said how much he hates the judge and the jurist. It's extraordinary. So this is all going on. subtly threatened, you know, people who are testifying and stuff like that. That's what the judge said. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

So this is all been going on. But, Charles, this is the thing you have the dirt on, which is so entertaining. I finally got to the point here. Yes. The juror selection. So they've had, I think they went through about 60 potential jurors over the days. And basically both sides can find a reason to object. In the end, they managed to impanel a jury.

Yes. But they have this whole questionnaire, Charles, all these, have you ever written or posted on social media about Donald Trump? Yeah. And the amazing thing was Trump had to say. sit there through the whole thing. That's right. And so the whole point is the first thing was a verbal question, which was, do you reckon you could do a fair trial? And at that point, about half the jurors put up their hand and went, nah, and they were out of there already, right? So then they got down to, yeah, I think was it about 40 or 50 jurors who left over who had said,

no, no, we can be, we can be fair. We can be impartial. Yeah, we can be impartial, right. And then what happens, it's absolutely fascinating in these trials. The way it works is they have experts in jury selection sitting there, you know, behind the lawyers, quickly Googling and searching social media, scraping the web for anything that these jurors have potentially written, right? Yeah. But they've got to do it in real time because they don't know who the jurors are going to be until they get there. And so if you've been on social media in the past 10 years or so, you've almost certainly. Posted something about Trump.

Yes, exactly. So, but the thing is, so Trump's sitting there and then they have to, as sort of a gotcha against these jurors who they're trying to knock out, have to bring up the memes and then show them to the court, right? So Trump then had to sit there for hours with all these jurors one by one being said, well, hang on, you know, on last Tuesday, did you share an AI generated video of Trump saying, I'm dumb as fuck, right? He's just trying to judge had to say to the juror. And the juror, and then they played the video. Of course, you've got to play the video. So Trump had to watch this video of him, an AI version of himself saying, I'm dumb as fuck.

Then the man tried to, at that point, conceal that he'd done it. And protested that the video was only something he'd reposted, right? At which point, the judge went, nah, get out of my court. And it sounds as though the guy was dumb as fuck. I don't want to fake me. Yeah. Thank you for your patience. Your call is important.

Can't take being on hold anymore? FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca. The Chaser Report. News a few days after it happens. So but then a lot of them were things from like old, old.

history. So there was like one from 2008. Wow. Where, you know, and the jury was sort of going along and it sort of seemed like they would be selected. But then they, this, you know, one of the jury selectors found this joke referencing the Thai youth soccer team that had been trapped in a flooded cave system and rescued in the summer of 2018 when Trump was still in office. And And the meme basically had that photo and the headline was Trump invites Thai boys to the White House and the boys request return to their cave. So you print a joke. But apparently what this did in the courtroom was people started laughing at the jokes that had been tweeted against Trump.

Now, there's one thing we know for certain about Donald Trump is he hates jokes about himself. Like if you go back and watch the White House correspondent dinner, where Barack Obama is basically making fun of him over that, all the birth certificate stuff. Trump went to that and he's sitting there absolutely furious at the jokes at his expense. And you'd imagine what he would have been like in the courtroom. Oh, and because the thing is, so Rolling Stone rode up a lot of these. But the point that they kept on making was it was just an hilarious, it was like a six-hour hilarious, it was like a comedy central roasting.

Which they have, is that one. They were quite well-written gas. There was once a comedy central roast. Donald Trump. How did that happen? How did he agree to it? Anyway, but what about this one? So this is another juror that they were trying to get rid of. The lawyer says to the juror, it says here that you tweeted and I quote, fuck that treasonous orange shit-gibbon and the dead ferret on his head. Is that accurate?

And then the judge has to read out the quote. And then the juror admitted it, or the prospective juror, admitted it. And then the lawyer turns to the judge and says, the tweet speaks for itself, Your Honor. And then he got dismissed. Which the ferret can't Yeah There's more I'm just trying to find the other ones

Oh yeah There's my favourite There's heaps of them No there's I mean there were It's worth just going back But the shit gibbons Worth a mention

The shit gibbons I haven't heard that time before This is my favourite one So there was So this was like way back This was like 2015 This meme

And it wasn't posted By the juror It was posted by the husband Of a potential juror Right. So this is how far they got into the scraping of all the social media. Like they were actually, they weren't just looking up, you know, your own post. They're looking up your partner's posts.

It's impressive, isn't it? Very thorough. Extraordinary. I wish they would be more thorough in basically every other aspect of life in America. But anyway, they can do jury selection. So then it was a meme. It was Trump sitting next to Obama. And the caption read, I don't think this is what they meant by Orange is the New Black.

I see what that is. Yeah, yeah, because he's got orange skin. So, there's some just, it's just really good. It's just, anyway. I mean, it just goes, it makes me sad in a sense, Charles, because Twitter used to be so full of snarky, funny political commentary. Yes. Before Elon Musk turned into a sort of raging hellscape of neo-Nazi sort of commentary.

But people used, whenever anything would happen, you'd go on Twitter and people would be making jokes about it as it happened. But the truth is, a lot of these ones I saw on TikTok. So at least they won't ban TikTok. Oh, wait a minute. Okay. So I think the thing that really surprises me about all this, Charles, and full credit to them, is that they managed to find a jury.

The trial has gone ahead. And all these revelations from David Pecker about the catch-and-kill scheme, it's been really fascinating. It's been absolutely fascinating. The one thing that's a little bit concerning is, so the way jury duty works is you've got to come to a consensus at the end of your thing. So you're not allowed to discuss it with other jurors during the trial. You've got to hear all the evidence.

And then at the end, you get locked in a room with them. And you compare notes on what you think, right? And so it really does make a difference about whether you've got somebody on there who's an ideologue or not. Like, if you've got anyone who's definitely going to convict or not convict Trump, then, you know, like it doesn't matter if the other 11 agree one way or the other. Yeah, if you're a hardcore pro-Trump or I just think he couldn't possibly have done it. The jury is going to be hung no matter what, and vice versa. And there is one juror, and I don't know how they got through, but juror number two gets her news from three sources.

It's truth social, Fox News, and X. An X. Yeah. Wow. And so that's going to be the one where, because sometimes, I heard this great interview with this lawyer who went, sometimes you can just tell when you've lost a juror and you're fucked. You're going to have a hung jury.

And say all lies on juror. too. Okay, so you heard it here. The, yeah, that's, if you're getting your news from Truth Social about the trial, it's a witch hunt, it's a coup, the judge is very, very unfair. Look, he's an anti-Trump judge, Charles, that's what I've heard. In fairness, it could be just that whoever this person is has an aesthetic liking for all caps, because as far as I can see, most truth social posts are in all caps. They're the more capitalised that he's, the more truities, that's what I've heard.

Ah, right. So this court case is going to be absolutely fascinating. But the big picture is Trump is spending all of his time in court and not out there on the stand campaigning to be president. Yes, but that's just, that's his campaign. That's his campaign. Like, I don't think that that, that's just, that's his campaign. It's like the way they hid Joe Biden the first time around because it was, quote, unquote, the pandemic. This is, this is the campaign.

And as we know, Donald Trump, by definition, will suffer advertising. Absolutely no consequences for any of this. I mean, it will be surviving all of these court cases when he does and becomes president. It will be the greatest no consequence move of all time. I mean, this is basically invincible. Everyone might as well just give up and say, okay, there's even death itself will not stop this man. Oh, thank God it's not like that in Australia yet. When the Firth regime kicks in.

Oh, my goodness. Coy drois. Our gear is from Road. We're part of the Iconiclass Network. See tomorrow. Is that a ferret on your head, Charles? No, it's quadruly. Thank you for your patience.

Your call is important. Can't take being on hold anymore. FIS is 100% online, so you can make the switch in minutes. Mobile plans start at $15 a month. Certain conditions apply. Details at FIS.ca.