Former federal prosecutor: Trump admitted to '2nd degree murder' in Woodward interview

President Trump.
(Image credit: Mark Wilson/Getty Images)

Former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner thinks President Trump's coronavirus admissions should land him in prison.

In a Thursday appearance on SiriusXM's The Dean Obeidallah Show, the MSNBC legal analyst gave an incredibly harsh assessment of Trump's interviews with veteran reporter Bob Woodward. Trump's insistence in March that he wanted to "play down" the coronavirus threat despite knowing its deadliness "upped his own criminal ante to second-degree murder," Kirschner said, breaking down the pieces of the alleged charge step by step.

"There are only two elements for second-degree murder. The first is you caused the death of another," Kirschner said Thursday. That factor was fulfilled because Trump "was lying to the American people about the danger this virus posed," and now 190,000 people are dead, Kirschner said. "The second element is the intent element," which would "get tricky if we didn't have Trump's incriminating admissions," he continued. But "in my opinion as a career prosecutor," Trump admitted to "conscious disregard" of the risk his coronavirus downplay created, thus admitting to "second-degree murder" that he "must be held accountable" for, Kirschner finished. Kathryn Krawczyk

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Kathryn Krawczyk

Kathryn is a graduate of Syracuse University, with degrees in magazine journalism and information technology, along with hours to earn another degree after working at SU's independent paper The Daily Orange. She's currently recovering from a horse addiction while living in New York City, and likes to share her extremely dry sense of humor on Twitter.