PBS and MSNBC are sometimes hard to tell apart. On Friday night's PBS NewsHour pundit panel, former MSNBC personality Geoff Bennett raised the unprecedented, norm-shattering $454 million civil bond hanging over Donald Trump from the civil-fraud trial of Democrat Attorney General Letitia James.
Bennett played a Fox News clip where host Martha MacCallum asked Trump lawyer Alina Habba if Trump would go to foreign leaders for money, like Joy Behar is claiming. Habba evaded an answer.
PBS, showing a Fox News clip? But they hate Fox. Here's the thing: MSNBC played this clip on eight different programs on Wednesday and Thursday, starting with Joy Reid. Jimmy Kimmel also played the clip in his monologue.
PBS pundit -- and MSNBC weekend host -- Jonathan Capehart said going to foreign governments would be dumb: "I think someone who's running for president of the United States should automatically say, yes, I owe a half-a-billion dollars. I'm not going to go to foreign governments, because that would open me up, as president of the United States, to foreign interference and foreign influence."
This is how shameless these leftists are, that they can inveigh against taking many millions of dollars in foreign influences and not think of the Biden family's millions of dollars in foreign influence-peddling all over. But then Capehart overtly expressed his lust for New York Attorney General Letitia James, a Democrat who campaigned on ruining Trump, to take Trump Tower and a golf course. That's "accountability."
CAPEHART: But we're not talking about any old, regular person. And, of course, he's going to take the money from wherever he can get it. That's been his entire career. And I have to disagree with David. No, take the properties. If any of us at the table were in that situation, we would be in serious trouble.
And it would be within the right of the attorney general to say, you know what, we're going to take your golf club or we're going to take your tower. And, quite honestly, I would love to see the A.G., the New York attorney general, do that, because then it would be the most tangible sign for the nation, the world, and for Donald Trump that you have been held accountable.
Earlier, David Brooks stipulated for a moment that this enormous fine has no precedent: "I have a few problems with the seizure. The Associated Press did a good survey. They looked like at 70 years of cases like this. And in cases where there was no clear victim, they have never seized assets before. And so if the people who claim a lot of this is a political witch-hunt, I think that Associated Press, I found it kind of alarming that the Trump case is not being treated like the other cases."
But then, surely to keep the leftist audience at PBS from fainting, he leaned into the foreign-influence idea: "you take what a desperate Donald Trump is likely to do, do what his son-in-law did, go to the Saudis and get some money, and it just opens up for a desperate Donald Trump all sorts of corrupt possibilities."
The NewsHour is funded by you, the American taxpayer, and by American Cruise Lines.
