If Rudy Giuliani limply swinging a golf club in oversized shorts is the laugh-out-loud image that will get us through this month, then April was most definitely defined by Donald Trump’s hilariously serious claims that flying tomatoes, bananas, and pineapples (huh?) are like missiles, with equally deadly consequences. In freshly released transcripts from an October 2021 deposition, the former president explained that he and his team were “on alert” for rogue fruit-flingers in the crowds during his campaign stops because “you can be killed” if you were to be hit with a tomato. While most of the world is still chuckling at the absurdity of it all, to Trump’s lawyers, publishing the former president’s words is no laughing matter.
As The Daily Beast reports, a flurry of emails show that—even after stories about the transcript had already been written, shared, and laughed about—Trump’s legal team was doing its darndest to “un-make it public” by having the deposition, which was published as part of a public record, erased from evidence.
As Jose Pagliery wrote for The Daily Beast:
Snippets of that transcript—which was chock-full of references to the risk of getting hit with tomatoes—were filed in the court docket by the protesters’ attorney at 7:18 p.m. last Tuesday.
But while two Daily Beast journalists were preparing to publish a story about the fruity deposition, Trump’s legal team was trying to pressure the plaintiff’s lawyer, Benjamin N. Dictor, to delete his own filing. (Dictor also happens to represent The Daily Beast’s News Guild.)
“That exhibit is unnecessary, prejudicial and needs to be pulled ASAP,” Trump defense attorney Jeffrey Goldman wrote to him at 8:08 p.m.
Alina Habba, another Trump lawyer, chimed in as well: “ASAP Ben. That is wholly inappropriate and prejudicial.”
Despite their quick action and insistence, Team Trump’s efforts were, well, fruitless. Once The Daily Beast’s story dropped, it became the perfect fodder for talk show hosts including Seth Meyers, Rachel Maddow, and Trevor Noah—not to mention media outlets like UPROXX.
Even so, Dictor was still reportedly working on the matter the next morning, after all the fruit fallout, to have the digital copy of the public record changed with the agreement of all parties involved. According to an email from Dictor, he was “advised that they will not remove a document from the docket unless it was either (i) filed to wrong case or (ii) filed to the wrong court.” God bless America!
(Via The Daily Beast)