Trump judge wants Michael Cohen to stop talking until he testifies | The Excerpt

On Saturday’s episode of The Excerpt podcast: Former lawyer Michael Cohen is set to testify Monday in former President Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial, but until he actually takes the stand, the judge wants him to stop talking. Two Presidential candidates with two very different campaigns. We take a closer look at the split screen election. A move to admit Palestine as a full member of the United Nations leads to a strong response from Israel. Meanwhile, the Biden administration acknowledged that Israel likely used U.S.-made weapons to inflict a higher number of civilian casualties in Gaza than is broadly deemed acceptable. Doctors are experimenting with artificial intelligence in medical practices, hoping it will help with burnout and make patients feel heard. A Virginia school district may be the first in the nation to rename two local schools after Confederate leaders – four years after the 2020 murder of George Floyd led the district to remove the names in the first place. Today is World Migratory Bird Day, a global campaign to raise awareness of the twice-annual bird migrations and promote conservation efforts.

Hit play on the player below to hear the podcast and follow along with the transcript beneath it.  This transcript was automatically generated, and then edited for clarity in its current form. There may be some differences between the audio and the text.

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Sara Ganim:

Good morning. I'm Sara Ganim, filling in for Taylor Wilson. Today is Saturday, May 11th, 2024. And this is The Excerpt. Today, Michael Cohen will be the next big witness in Trump's Manhattan criminal trial. But the judge wants him to stop talking until he actually takes the stand. Plus a Biden administration report says US-made weapons may have resulted in higher civilian casualties in Gaza. And a Virginia school district may be the first in the nation to restore Confederate names to schools. A move that some fear other districts could follow.

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But first, after pretty salacious testimony earlier this week, day number 15 of the Trump trial in New York, it ended kind of quietly. On Friday, jurors were shown a series of text messages from 2016 between Stormy Daniels, former manager Gina Rodriguez, and ex-editor of the National Enquirer Dylan Howard. The messages included Rodriguez telling Howard that Daniels was Trump's mistress.

And earlier in the day, Judge Juan Merchan ruled in favor of the defense, barring the prosecution from showing jurors a video from 1999 showing Trump bragging about his knowledge about campaign finance laws. Prosecutors wanted to use the video to demonstrate that Trump knew Cohen's hush money payment was an illegal contribution to his 2016 campaign. But Judge Merchan agreed with Trump's lawyer that the video was too old. But the biggest news of the day was actually about testimony that is set to come on Monday when Trump's former lawyer, Michael Cohen, is expected to take the stand.

Going into the weekend, Judge Merchan asked prosecutors to tell Cohen to stop talking publicly about Trump and the trial, after Trump's lawyers argued that it's unfair that Trump is under a gag order, but Cohen isn't. Cohen's testimony is expected to be fiery and also crucial to the heart of the prosecution's case. You can stay up to date with live updates from inside and outside the Manhattan courtroom at usatoday.com.

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If it seems like the two presumptive nominees for president are running two very different races, well, that's because experts and historians say they are. USA Today White House correspondent Joey Garrison talks about the split screen election cycle and how strange it is. Hey, Joey, thanks so much for joining The Excerpt.

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, thanks for having me on.

Sara Ganim:

So your reporting is all about this split screen of the two presidential campaigns in this bizarre situation where Biden and Trump don't really seem to be talking about the same stuff in the campaign, set the stage for us.

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, well, stepping back here, I mean, we always knew this was kind of a unique, almost unprecedented election where first of all, you have a former president in Trump trying to win again against the person who he of course lost to in 2020. Trump, of course tried to overturn the last election and is now facing multiple court cases. So all that context, we knew heading into this once we realized it was going to be Biden and Trump like we thought it would, that we're in for a totally different type of election. And I really think that kind of crystallized this last week where you have obviously Trump in the middle of his hush money trial in New York. And on Tuesday, really at the exact same time you had President Biden giving a keynote address commemorating Holocaust Remembrance Day of really quite a split screen that I think kind of captured the uniqueness of this election we find ourselves in.

Sara Ganim:

Yeah. So just to drill down into each campaign for a second, Trump, as you mentioned, he spent the week focused on his defense in a New York criminal court. Very salacious details about his alleged affair with Stormy Daniels came out. What does that specifically meant for his campaign?

Joey Garrison:

Well, Trump, as we expected, is using this, and he's telegraphed this for a long time, saying that this case is one brought by his political foes. He's made the argument that I would love to be out in Wisconsin and Georgia campaigning, but I'm stuck here in this courtroom. And he said that repeatedly this past week to appeal to his base to rally supporters around him. And I think it's been somewhat effective in terms of getting other Republicans who support him to follow through on that argument.

Sara Ganim:

And in Biden world, you write that things have really been dominated by the war in Gaza and the criticism that Biden faces. Tell me about that.

Joey Garrison:

Well, I mentioned that speech earlier in which he condemned the real forceful way anti-Semitism that's arisen during this Israel-Hamas war. More recently, he came out and said in an interview on CNN, if Israel were to move forward with a full scale invasion of Rafah in Southern Gaza, that he would withhold certain offensive weapons going from the US to Israel to help them carry out that invasion. And that's a real turning point in this, the US foreign policy, a turning point with Biden's relationship with Netanyahu. And it's one that I think it can't be viewed in any other way than the context of the criticism he's gotten from the left, from people opposing his steadfast support from Israel. And now it has gotten him a lot of criticism from supporters of Israel, Israel itself, as well as Republicans that he would dare not follow through a full commitment to whatever Israel needs to carry out its war.

Sara Ganim:

So basically you have two candidates who are campaigning in a vacuum. Is the Trump part of this split screen likely to sway voters?

Joey Garrison:

This is such a divided electorate, as we all know, that I think how you're viewing Trump's case, for example, it is determined by which party you were viewing it from. We'll see if the actual verdict, which way it goes maybe determines things differently. But I think you've already kind of made up your mind on Trump one way or another, most folks. And I don't know if this is going to sway things either way, and another thing to point out is I think it's very possible that this could be the only Trump trial we have before the November election. We once thought there could be as many as four. That's how many cases are out there. But the Trump team has been successful and benefited from various postponements in the Florida case involving classified documents and in the Georgia conspiracy case. And so it's possible this could be the only time this case that we see Trump in court before the election.

Sara Ganim:

Yeah, it certainly sounds like there are two very different sets of challenges being faced by the two presumptive presidential nominees. Joey Garrison, thank you so much.

Joey Garrison:

Yeah, thanks for having me on. Enjoyed it.

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Sara Ganim:

The war in Gaza took center stage at the United Nations again on Friday, when Israel's ambassador took a mock copy of a UN charter and fed it through a shredder.

Speaker:

So that you can see exactly what you are inflicting upon the UN charter with this destructive vote. This is... You are shredding the UN charter with your own hands.

Sara Ganim:

Earlier the Palestinian envoy spoke emotionally about the death toll in Gaza.

Speaker:

We want peace. We want freedom. There is no word harder to pronounce when tens of thousands of your people have been killed.

Sara Ganim:

This all comes on the heels of several other key developments related to Israel's war with Hamas. First, humanitarian officials told USA Today that aid shipments to Gaza have slowed to a trickle. Israeli officials also ordered about 100,000 residents to evacuate Rafah as fighting and bombing continues there. And the Biden administration acknowledged Friday that Israel likely used US-made weapons to inflict a higher number of civilian casualties in Gaza than is broadly deemed acceptable. The report which circulated Friday among lawmakers stopped short of saying that Israel has violated US weapons policy or international humanitarian law.

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Doctor's offices are experimenting with artificial intelligence in order to cut down on physician burnout and also to cut back on data input during patient visits. My colleague Taylor Wilson spoke with USA Today, health reporter Karen Weintraub for more.

Taylor Wilson:

Karen, thanks for hopping on.

Karen Weintraub:

Thanks for having me.

Taylor Wilson:

So Karen, tell us about these new software programs that use artificial intelligence as part of the Doctor-patient relationship.

Karen Weintraub:

So they're testing them out at the moment. Basically, the problem as most of us know, is that we now see the back of our doctor's heads a lot of the times when we go to a primary care visit because they're so busy entering data into a computer. The electronic health records that we're supposed to revolutionize medical care have helped in some ways, but hurt in others. And so this is supposed to address that problem.

Taylor Wilson:

So what are they learning as they use and study these tools and what are some of the benefits and drawbacks here?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, so the benefit is that the doctor doesn't have to spend as much time typing in the notes and then summarizing them. So I learned some new terminology here. Pajama time apparently is the time that doctors have to spend working outside of work. For every hour a doctor spends in the office with you, they spend two hours at home typing up their notes and inputting ,hatever they said to you into the system. So that's what this is supposed to address, that extra time that the doctors have to spend working on their notes. The doctor, I watched her talk to a patient and then go back to her office. It literally took her two to three minutes instead of an hour to enter that data. So it really does dramatically cut down that time to write down the notes and to enter any data into the system.

So from that perspective, it's a huge time saver. The hope is that it will cut down on burnout. Right now, physician burnout is a really big problem in medicine. A huge number of doctors say that they're just fried, they're ready to leave. 63% of doctors, this was right after the pandemic in 2021, said that they were tired of medicine and basically ready to leave. We don't know if those numbers have come down again a little bit since then. And it costs 800,000 to $1.5 million to replace a doctor who chooses to leave a system. And we're already facing a shortage of doctors. So it really does have dramatic effects. And again, you know as a patient, if you lose your trusted doctor, it can have consequences. So it does kind of ripple through the system when there's medical burnout.

Taylor Wilson:

Are they finding any drawbacks or obstacles to this technology as they study it?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, so one of the doctors I talked to said she's a little dubious about the system. She said she'd rather have a human than a machine or the paid transcriptionist could do this job just as efficiently and without some of the drawbacks. What she worries about is that totally automating this system takes the thinking person out. And that if you've ever written anything, you know that you kind of process as you write. And if you take that process away, that the doctor might not think through your history or constellation of symptoms quite so much and might just take whatever the computer spits out as the diagnosis without thinking it through. And maybe the doctor would have another idea about what's going wrong, than the computer would, but without spending that time wouldn't come to that conclusion. So that's really her worry about that.

Taylor Wilson:

Karen, medicine is often known for its slow pace of change. I'm curious, will the medical community be quick to jump on board here and what's next for this research going forward?

Karen Weintraub:

Yeah, as the doctor pointed out to me, she still has a fax machine in her office. The people I talk to obviously are sort of the front-runners of this technology. They're in academic medicine. Whether it will take off in other areas is unclear, but the doctors themselves are the ones pushing for it in this case. And again, it is a huge burden right now, this note-taking on their lives. So I do think that they'll be more open to it than perhaps doctors were in the past when they were very tied to their yellow legal pads or whatever.

Taylor Wilson:

We shall see. Karen Weintraub covers health for USA Today. Thanks as always, Karen.

Karen Weintraub:

Thank you.

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Sara Ganim:

A Virginia school district may be the first in the nation to restore the names of Confederate leaders to two local schools. Shenandoah County School board members voted 5-1 last week to reverse the names of Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School back to Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School. The members who voted for the reversal said that the board failed to get public input years ago when it made the decision to drop the original names, which honored Confederate Generals, Robert E. Lee, Thomas Stonewall Jackson, and Turner Ashby. The vote could prompt other districts to follow suit.

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And finally, today is World Migration Bird Day. So if you get a chance, take a walk in the woods, look up and listen. To find out more, there's a link in today's show notes.

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And by the way, don't forget to listen to Sunday's special episode of The Excerpt. Both medical professionals and governments agree that vaccines are good for us. So why do some people remain unconvinced? Listen as Ina Pinkney, a passionate speaker who travels around the country advocating for vaccines, joins host Dana Taylor to discuss the anti-vax movement. You can find the episode right here beginning tomorrow morning at 5:00 A.M. Eastern.

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Thanks as always for listening to The Excerpt. You can get the podcast wherever you get your audio, and if you're on a smart speaker, just ask for The Excerpt. I'm Sarah Ganim filling in for Taylor Wilson, who will be back on Monday with more of The Excerpt from USA Today. We are produced by Shannon Rae Green and Bradley Glanzrock. Our executive producer is Laura Beatty.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump judge wants Cohen to be silent until he testifies | The Excerpt