Pat Screlley has been live streaming and tweeting about the trial. But on Friday, he walked into a courtroom set up for reporters and began to vent were you there? Yes, I was there, And it was quite by surprise that happened during the court break. And the only thing we can surmises that maybe he got lonely because he realized that no one was in the courtroom. We must be somewhere. So he walked into this open courtroom where the reporters are writing their stories during the lunch break, and he
started saying, why are you writing this? Why are you writing that you know and criticizing the government's witnesses, and how how did he leave the room? How and how
long did this conversation go on? The It was about five minutes long, and most of us were so shocked when it happened that we sort of everyone would kind of take turns asking a question because it was so shocking that or surprising that the defendant would come in and start personally talking about each witness and assessing their credibility and making comments about the government, just accrediting the government and the prosecutor's style, and so it finally ended.
It was about five minutes long, and it finally ended when we suddenly heard the door courtroom door open it and was Benjamin Braffman, his defense lawyer, saying Martin, could I see you for a minute, and then Screlli was basically asked to take a taken away by his lawyer. Well, Braffman did seem to be keeping him under control. As for our social media for a little while, but so that seemed to be the last straw for the prosecutors.
Tell us what they asked for and what happened. Well, he's been um tweeting and retweeting comments criticizing the government's case, the veracity of the witnesses under a new Twitter handle. You guys might remember in January he was banned from Twitter for harassing a female reporter and he reincarnated himself under a new handle, and that's what he was using to retweet comments about, Oh, this witness is a victim,
how could she be a victim? For example? So, um, he's been doing that during the trial and making comments about things that in court on his on his Twitter, on his Twitter page, and in Facebook. So what did the prosecutors asked to have done, they asked to gag him, and they wanted him either to be gagged completely during the trial to prevent it from me talking around the courthouse, or to partially sequestered the jury, which is they only do in mafia or in terrorism cases when the safety
of the juries under in questions. So what they do is they'll have a marshal escort them to in front of courthouse and keep them away from other people. The judge said she would refuse to do that because that would be punishing the jury and they're already in the courtroom for ten hours a day listening to testimonies. So she decided they needed to have their time outside in the in the free outdoors, in the fresh air. Pat. In your story today, you mentioned that prosecutors revealed that
Screlly's lawyers offered to have him plead guilty talk. Can you tell us a little more about that. Yeah. One of my colleagues asked, when Screlly came into the press room on Friday, So, Martin, why did you go to trial? Oh? Did the government after ever offer you a plea deal? And he didn't quite answer it. He kept insisting I wanted my day in court. I wanted my day in court, and the prosecutor UM today raised that as another example
of inaccuracies the Screlly statements. She said that Um there had been repeated multiple requests by initiated by the defense, by Screlli's legal team to a plea deal as recently as UM June nineteenth, which was a week before the trial started, So she wanted to put the you know, the truth to the matter that the defense had repeatedly
asked the government for a plea deal. Pat Screlly's own lawyer, Benjamin Breathman, in his opening statement, said that his client might be just nuts and called has called him strange but brilliant. Today he said, well, he's relatively young though he's thirty four. Is Breathman building a defense around Screlly's
odd and erratic behavior. In some way, it does seem to be the case because his lawyer is explained, as he was trying to explain to the judge, the judge said, you have four lawyers with this, why wasn't someone watching Martin? So now a defense lawyer is going to be assigned to watch him at all times, and UM, it does seem that that's the defenses argument that he may be strange, he may be odd, but he's not guilty. And how much longer do you and the jurors have to sit
through this trial? Well, this is supposed to be up to a five week trial, so we were only in day um, technically day four of today's the fourth day and we're only on the fourth witness. So more to more to, you know, stay tuned. And oh and also scrawley um newest Twitter handle, just got the suspended