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--:-- John Bickley: Former President Trump is fined for contempt of court in New York and threatened with possible jail time if he continues to criticize those involved in the case. The witnesses in this case have no gag. Their free speech, their First Amendment rights are completely intact. We have the latest on the hush money trial and Trump's public feud with the judge.
--:-- John Bickley: The judge determined it in the case because they have no case. I'm Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley with guest host Mary Margaret Olihan, senior reporter for The Daily Signal.
--:-- Mary Margaret Olihan: It's Wednesday, May 1st, and this is Morning Wire.
--:-- John Bickley: Anti-Israel protesters further escalate their attacks on college campuses, smashing windows and taking control of buildings while some schools shut down. You're just a white person. You're a white person. We don't like white people. Free, free Palestine!
--:-- John Bickley: And a big win in court for the Arizona cattle rancher accused of murdering an illegal immigrant. Thanks for waking up with Morning Wire. Stay tuned. We have the news you need to know.
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--:-- John Bickley: Donald Trump was found in contempt of court in his New York City hush money case on Tuesday as the trial pushed into its third week. While there was some testimony in the courtroom, the headline moment was Judge Juan Mershon finding Trump in contempt for posts he made about witnesses in the case.
--:-- John Bickley: Here to talk about the decision and where the case stands today is Daily Wire contributor David Marcus.
--:-- David Marcus: Hey, Dave. So let's start with this contempt finding. What was Trump's punishment?
--:-- John Bickley: Morning, John. Donald Trump has been officially gagged, so to speak, as Judge Mershon found the former president in contempt of court for violating his order against commenting about the case nine times with fines set at a thousand bucks a pop. Trump was also given until about 2 p.m. on Tuesday to delete the social media posts in question, which was complied with.
--:-- David Marcus: The most dramatic part of all this was the judge saying that the financial penalty may not be sufficient and that if Trump keeps testing him, quote, jail may be a necessary punishment, end quote.
--:-- John Bickley: This is a possibility that most observers think is very remote, even just logistically. I mean, Would Trump bunk up with his Secret Service protection? But the judge is the judge. That's what he said. And he has the authority to do it.
--:-- David Marcus: It's also worth noting he made this threat just a day before Trump is set to appear at rallies in the Midwest, an opportunity perhaps to vent. So that's something to keep an eye on.
--:-- John Bickley: In good news for Trump Marshawn will allow him to attend his son Barron graduation Well there that I guess As to the testimony itself once they got to it what did we learn from the slate of witnesses Tuesday And were there any moments that stood out There really weren
--:-- David Marcus: The witnesses were mainly there to establish some facts and evidence such as a deposition and three videos. Trepp's team doesn't dispute their authenticity, but has chosen not to stipulate to them. And that means prosecutors have to establish their veracity.
--:-- John Bickley: Thus far, what's been remarkable is that there isn't a ton of disagreement about the general facts of this case. In a sense, both the prosecutors and the defense agree on what the puzzle pieces are here. They disagree on what picture it makes.
--:-- David Marcus: The DA says it depicts election interference. Trump's lawyers say it shows a standard everyday non-disclosure agreement and that there is no crime.
--:-- John Bickley: Later in the day, Keith Davidson, who had been a lawyer for both Stormy Daniels and And Karen McDougal, who also was alleged to have an affair with Trump, testified about selling their stories, but he gave no evidence about Trump's motives or state of mind.
--:-- David Marcus: Going back to Trump's decision to obey the judge's order to remove his posts, is that an indication that we might see Trump sort of back off on attacking figures like Michael Cohen and Daniels, or is this more of a strategic retreat?
--:-- John Bickley: I think there is some gamesmanship here. Trump in all of his legal proceedings has a tendency to walk right up to the line that judges said. In this case, he crossed it.
--:-- David Marcus: There are people in Trump's orbit who have advocated essentially for open defiance, almost daring Marchand to jail a former president and current front running candidate. The idea being that this would help him in the election. Others advise more caution.
--:-- John Bickley: And after all, Trump is playing with his literal freedom here. Just as Joe Biden has an administration and a campaign that might not always see eye to eye on policy. Trump has a legal team and a campaign that also at times may be at odds with each other, leaving Trump to choose between the two.
--:-- David Marcus: Ultimately, Alvin Bragg is attempting to put Donald Trump on trial while Trump is trying to put the trial itself on trial by calling it unfair. It seems very unlikely that Trump and his surrogates will stop making that point, but Trump himself may well tread more lightly so as to not spark the ire of the judge again.
--:-- John Bickley: Well, fascinating legal and political game being played out here. Dave, thanks for joining us.
--:-- David Marcus: Thanks for having me.
--:-- John Bickley: After my friend got peeled away and basically just carried off by the mob, then I had a friend who they let through and told me that he thought that I was an imminent extreme threat for my own physical safety. That was Rory Wilson, a senior at Columbia University, describing what he witnessed when anti-Israel protesters stormed and occupied a campus building yesterday.
--:-- John Bickley: Similar unrest has broken out at colleges and universities across the country. Daily Wire reporter Megan Basham is here now with the latest.
--:-- Megan Basham: So Megan, what's happened at Columbia's Hamilton Hall is certainly a big escalation. What do we know at this point in time?
--:-- John Bickley: So what we know right now is that late Tuesday night, hundreds of NYPD officers, many of whom were wearing riot gear, began removing the trespassers who had taken over and vandalized Hamilton Hall, which if you're not familiar, is an historic campus building that was occupied back in 1968 during the Vietnam protests.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the police entered the building through a second floor window using a ramp extended from an emergency vehicle. And they then removed the occupiers one by one. We're hearing that they zip tied their hands behind their back and arrested them.
--:-- John Bickley: In a statement, the university said they regretted that the protesters escalated the situation, adding, quoting here after the university learned overnight that Hamilton Hall had been occupied vandalized and blockaded we were left with no choice
--:-- Megan Basham: Now on some videos from earlier that morning you can see Rory Wilson and his friend Charles Beck standing in front of the main doors of the building trying to stop that crowd from entering. Wilson told me that when he and Beck and another friend arrived, they saw protesters, many of them masked and dressed all in black, climbing through windows.
--:-- John Bickley: Some were even carrying suitcases as if they planned to occupy this building for the long haul. They'd already barricaded the insides of the doors with a ton of the classroom chairs, and they had human chains all around the entrance that prevented anyone from getting in.
--:-- Megan Basham: They started grabbing these pretty large steel tables and were carrying them up to blockade the doors. And we were just in the middle of the protest right by the door, as they were trying to put the tables against them and then tie them down.
--:-- John Bickley: So Charles and I started pushing the table back, preventing them from continuing to barricade the door and stood in front of there just to keep it from getting more blocked.
--:-- Megan Basham: At that point, it was all very spur of the moment. I just started telling people that I am fully entitled to stand here in an open area of my campus. I'm free to protest. this protest is completely inappropriate. This is completely inappropriate. You're violating the law. You're violating campus policy. You're defying all sorts of things.
--:-- John Bickley: And so I am free to stand here and register my dissent with this activity. And then they started manhandling us, trying to pull us away.
--:-- Megan Basham: At that point, Wilson said Beck had been wrestled away from the door and he felt that the situation was getting so dangerous they needed to leave.
--:-- John Bickley: Now, as you say, this follows similar events all over the country. On Monday, Portland State was also forced to shut down after students broke into the library. They're still occupying that building.
--:-- Megan Basham: At UCLA, anti-Israel protesters have been harassing Jewish students. An eight-day occupation of an administration building at Cal Poly Humboldt just ended and more than 80 demonstrators have also been arrested at Virginia Tech.
--:-- John Bickley: And that follows encampments at a number of other schools, including Yale, the University of Pittsburgh, and UNC Chapel Hill. On a number of these campuses, students have torn down American flags and they're replacing them with Palestinian flags.
--:-- Megan Basham: Right, that footage has really gone viral. Now, some are saying that officials have not stepped in to stop these incidents and that they really turned a blind eye to this chaos.
--:-- John Bickley: Right, we're hearing that in a number of places. Just one example, a mother of a Jewish student at UCLA called the school to ask why it was allowing protesters to block her son from attending classes or accessing the library.
--:-- Megan Basham: And she recorded that call. And you can actually hear her being told that neither police nor the school plan to intervene. I don't know if I'm going to say it's tolerated, but unfortunately, the police are not intervening with that right now.
--:-- John Bickley: And this is coming from the university. So if you had any questions or concerns, you would take it with the university itself.
--:-- Megan Basham: So the university has taken a stance that they will not, in fact, allow or help Jewish students get to their classes, that this is going to be tolerated. We've received a directive to not intervene at this time, yes.
--:-- John Bickley: And that's very similar to what Wilson told me he experienced at Columbia yesterday. He said he and his friends called police and campus security expecting one of them to come There were multiple 911 calls I called campus safety immediately and said there had been assault and no response for hours Actually, just I don't think there has been a response, period.
--:-- Megan Basham: So you can hear a lot of frustration and even fear from parents and students who expect a lot more from administrators and local authorities.
--:-- John Bickley: Yeah, it's not hard to see why.
--:-- Megan Basham: Megan, thanks for reporting.
--:-- John Bickley: Anytime.
--:-- John Bickley: An elderly rancher in Arizona accused of murdering an illegal immigrant trespassing on his property will not be retried following a mistrial last month. The rancher George Allen Kelly has always maintained that he didn't shoot the illegal immigrant and pleaded not guilty to second-degree murder last year.
--:-- John Bickley: Here to discuss the latest developments in the case is Daily Wire senior editor Ash Short.
--:-- Ash Short: Hey Ash, so what happened here?
--:-- John Bickley: Well, in short, this is a major win for Kelly. This all began in January 2023, when the body of 48-year-old Gabriel Quen Buatamea was found on Kelly's property. Buatamea had been deported from the U.S. multiple times before, most recently in 2016, and he was one of a group of other suspected illegal immigrants who ran onto Kelly's property last year.
--:-- Ash Short: Prosecutors arrested Kelly and blamed him for Buatamea's death, But Kelly told investigators from the beginning that he only fired warning shots from his rifle into the air and not at anyone.
--:-- John Bickley: He also told investigators that he had seen people on his property with AK-47s.
--:-- Ash Short: All right, so he was tried last month, but a mistrial was declared. What led to that?
--:-- John Bickley: A jury couldn't reach a unanimous decision on whether Kelly was responsible for Bua Tamea's death, voting 7-1 to find him not guilty, so that's seven of the eight ruling in his favor.
--:-- Ash Short: The jury deliberated for more than 48 hours before saying they couldn't reach a decision. So ultimately, no agreement on a ruling.
--:-- John Bickley: What happens in those situations? Well, it's then up to prosecutors to determine whether they will retry the defendant or not. In this case, prosecutors decided not to retry Kelly, with Chief Deputy Santa Cruz County Attorney Kim Hundley attributing the decision to the, quote, unique circumstances and challenges surrounding this case.
--:-- Ash Short: Basically, they don't feel that another trial would come to a different conclusion. And so going through it again would be a waste of time and money.
--:-- John Bickley: In the end, was this a lack of evidence or weak arguments from the prosecution? Likely both.
--:-- Ash Short: Kelly says he fired warning shots in the air, and the prosecution says he didn't see anyone around with guns and had no right to fire his weapons since he wasn't in danger.
--:-- John Bickley: Kelly had said he fired the warning shots because he worried about his and his wife's safety after seeing a group of men with rifles running on his property.
--:-- Ash Short: Prosecutors argued he unnecessarily escalated the situation by using deadly force, while Kelly's attorney argued that he didn't use deadly force, but that he would have been justified if he had done so.
--:-- John Bickley: His attorney, Brenna Larkin, said, quote, He can fire warning shots to protect himself and to protect his wife, and that's exactly what he did. That's exactly what any man who cares about his wife and his home should do in this situation when faced with the threat that he was faced with, end quote.
--:-- Ash Short: So many are seeing this as a stand your ground type argument and ultimately a victory for the Second Amendment.
--:-- John Bickley: Right. Well, Ash, thank you so much for reporting.
--:-- Ash Short: You're welcome.
--:-- John Bickley: Thank you for listening this morning. We created this show to bring more balance to the national conversation. If you love our show and stand with that mission, consider subscribing, giving us a five-star rating, and most importantly, sharing our podcast with a friend.
--:-- John Bickley: Thanks for waking up with us. We'll be back this afternoon with more of the news you need to know.
