Following Her Shamefully Submissive Interview With Trump, Megyn Kelly Hits Him Hard

Trump's Personal, Racially Tinged Attacks On Federal Judge Alarm Legal Experts

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2016/06/trumps-personal-racially-tinged-attacks.html

Compendium Of Pax Posts About Donald Trump, Updated June 3, 2016

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In their last meeting, Fox News anchor Megyn Kelly laughed with her former adversary, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump, tossing him a handful of softball questions he could swiftly bat away. But Kelly took a swing right at him on her show Thursday evening, blasting the billionaire for his comments about Gonzalo Curiel, the federal judge presiding over the civil fraud lawsuits against Trump University, whom Trump has claimed is biased because of his Mexican heritage.

“This is out of line,” Kelly said, raising her voice. The Fox News host had planned to spend the segment talking about House Speaker Paul Ryan endorsing the candidate, but scrapped it when news broke a few hours before her broadcast that Trump told The Wall Street Journal that Curiel, a U.S. District Judge, had an “absolute conflict” presiding over a pair of cases in which plaintiffs accuse Trump University of duping them into paying thousands of dollars to learn Trump’s tricks of the real-estate trade. (According to one former employee of the now-defunct for-profit school, whose testimony was revealed on Tuesday, “Trump University was a fraudulent scheme” that “preyed upon the elderly and uneducated.”) The conflict, according to Trump, derives from the fact that Curiel is “of Mexican heritage” and a member of a Latino lawyers’ association. Curiel grew up in Indiana.

Trump told the Journal that his plan to close off the U.S. border with Mexico and his stated stance against illegal immigration makes the fact that Curiel’s parents are Mexican immigrants relevant. “I’m building a wall. It’s an inherent conflict of interest,” he said.

“The man is not Mexican. His parents are Mexican. He was born in Indiana. He has no conflict of interest,” Kelly deadpanned to the camera. “Now Trump is saying the judge needs to be investigated, someone should look into him, just because he’s ruled against Trump in this case repeatedly . . . That doesn’t make you biased. It doesn’t. Trump continues to attack a sitting federal judge who, by the way, did a lot to fight the drug cartels when he was a prosecutor, based on his ethnicity, suggesting he has an inherent conflict of interest because of his heritage. A Hispanic cannot judge a case against me, that’s what he’s saying.”

This was the fired-up anchor many were hoping to see in Kelly’s first Fox Broadcast special in May, in which she sat down face-to-face with the candidate after a months-long feud that began when Kelly asked him a question about his treatment of women during the first G.O.P. debate in August. For months following the debate, Trump slammed Kelly as a lightweight, suggested the reason for her tough question was that she was menstruating, and encouraged his online supporters to do the same.

Kelly harkened back to the months of harassment from Trump’s followers on Thursday night, subtly empathizing with what Judge Curiel could be about to go through at their hands. “Let me tell you, I guarantee you right now that this judge is getting threats, and vitriol and who knows what else,” she said.

Kelly set the record straight before moving on to broader Trump news: ”There’s no conflict of interest whatsoever based on his ethnicity, just to clear up this man’s reputation, who is a sitting federal judge and has served the country for four years in that capacity.”