Trump's tale of crying Manhattan court employees was 'absolute BS,' law enforcement source says
Former President Trump’s claim to a Fox News anchor that New York court employees were “crying” and apologizing for his arraignment on felony charges is “absolute BS” and doesn’t remotely resemble what took place, a law enforcement source familiar with the details of what transpired that day told Yahoo News.
“Zero,” said the source when asked how much truth there was to Trump’s colorful account. “There were zero people crying. There were zero people saying ‘I’m sorry.’”
Trump offered his version of events in an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson that aired Tuesday night.
“When I went to the courthouse, which is also a prison in a sense, they signed me in, and I’ll tell you, people were crying,” Trump told Carlson. “People that work there, professionally work there, that have no problems putting in murderers, and they see everybody. It’s a tough, tough place, and they were crying. They were actually crying. They said, ‘I’m sorry.’ They said, '2024, sir. 2024.’ And tears were pouring down their eyes.”
In fact, the source said, aside from his lawyers and Secret Service agents, Trump interacted only with a handful of district attorney employees at the courthouse and had extremely limited exposure with others during his arraignment last Tuesday in lower Manhattan.
Upon his arrival, Trump was informed of the charges against him and was booked on 34 felony counts for falsification of business records to conceal hush money payments to a porn star in the waning days of the 2016 presidential election. The former president, looking glum, said little during the booking, as did Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s deputies, who were with him throughout the process, the source said.
The only hiccup came when his fingers were too dry for his fingerprinting, at which point district attorney employees provided lotion for his fingers, the source added.
Carlson’s friendly interview with Trump was especially ironic given its timing. It comes on the eve of a trial slated to begin next Monday in Delaware, in which Carlson, along with his fellow host Sean Hannity and multiple Fox executives, are slated to be witnesses in a $1.6 billion defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News for airing debunked claims of 2020 election fraud by Trump and his surrogates.
The suit has already brought to light multiple internal emails and texts by Carlson, in which he expressed his private contempt for Trump and derided the claims of fraud and vote flipping being brought by his lawyers — views he never shared with his audience.
“I hate him passionately,” Carlson said about Trump in a text to one colleague on Jan. 4, 2021, adding in another text, “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights.”
In other exchanges, Carlson privately called the claims of Trump lawyer Sidney Powell about vote flipping by Dominion “insane” and "absurd.”
Yet during Tuesday night’s interview, Carlson never challenged or pushed back against any of Trump’s assertions, including an unusual exchange about the Biden administration’s alleged failure to rescue German shepherds from Afghanistan.
“They left everything,” Trump said of Biden’s pullout from Afghanistan. “They left in the dark of night. They left the lights on. They left the dogs, by the way.”
“They left the dogs?” Carlson asked.
“They left the dogs," Trump responded. "You know, the dog lovers, and you know there are a lot of them. I love dogs. You love dogs. One of the first questions I got was, ‘What did they do with the dogs?' Mostly German shepherds. They left them. The way they got out was so horrible. … We would have gotten out with strength and dignity.”
In her memoir, “Raising Trump,” the former president’s ex-wife Ivana wrote that Trump “was not a dog fan” and often expressed hostility to her poodle, Chappy.
