the prosecution gets close to resting. i'm michael smerconish in philadelphia. we are two weeks into the trial of former minneapolis police officer derek chauvin charged in connection with the death of george floyd. the prosecution continues to make its case in a week filled with potentially devastating testimony, including minneapolis police chief arradondo.

he joined the chorus of law enforcement voices testifying against chauvin but the case could come down to causation. others weighed in including doctors. the latter testifying that floyd died from a low level of oxygen, saying that even a healthy person subjected to what floyd was subjected to would have died. that is not exactly the same as what the jurors heard from the hennepin county chief medical examiner. on the stand he said floyd's underlying medical conditions and any drugs he had in his system could be contributing factors in his death but not the direct cause. which he maintains is, quote, cardiopulmonary arrest compl complicating law enforcement subdual, restraint, and neck

compression. while chauvin is at the very center of events surrounding george floyd's death, he is not the only officer who will stand trial for it. former minneapolis police officer thomas lane and two others have been charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. authorities say that lane and another officer held down other of floyd's body parts and lane's attorney said that chauvin declined lane's suggestions to roll floyd on to his side. so is chauvin's trial a harbinger of things to come for the other three customers? thomas lane's attorney earl gray joins me now. thank you for coming to the program. i'm an attorney general and paying close attention not to be swayed by other legal pundits. i've seen a prosecution going in very well with the defense best shot, maybe only shot, being causation. why am i wrong?

>> well, i think you might be right. the best defense on this case from chauvin's standpoint is the causation. excuse me. what you must remember -- and you're a lawyer -- is that the state, because it has a burden of proof goes first and you have not heard the defense case yet, that will come in next week. and i think when the defense case comes in and what the defense tries to establish is reasonable doubt reasonable doubt, i think there will be reasonable doubt with respect to the causation. i think even with baker's system, the last question by attorney blackwell that you determined this was a homicide was sort of unfair because that left an impression on the jury that his opinion of homicide is important. it isn't important in the

criminal arena. the homicide that baker is talking about deals with an autopsy and not the criminal law and he did testify to that, i guess, in hindsight if i was representing chauvin i might have had the last word there and pointed out to the jury and said even though baker says homicide, all that means is death at the hands of another, it did not determine any type of crime. and, again -- >> on the -- >> go ahead. >> i was going to say on the excessive force aspect of this case, if i want to in a rudimentary way divide it into excessive force and cause sayings the reason i find it so compelling and you perhaps are agreeing on me is the blue on blue quotient. any number, by my count, about a half dozen members of that police department. forget stiger who came in from l.a. you had the chief and lieutenant zimmerman, the supervisory

sergeant playinger in addition to other who said he violated the standard in some form or another. on causation, counselor, there are two very brief audio clips that i want to run. first there was the pulmonology, tobin. bottom line is here is why he said george floyd died. let's listen. >> the cause of death is a low level of oxygen that caused the brain damage and caused the heart to stop. >> low level of oxygen, asphyxia by another name. then medical examiner baker yesterday who was the only one who performed the autopsy. in cross-examination here was the change by nelson. >> you and i just visited from strangulation which is pressure from the front of the neck to the back of the neck and that is not something i think we see as medical goers pressure to the back of the neck explaining

strangulation. >> or asphyxiation? >> correct. >> reporter: he doesn't see asphyxiation but the pulmonologist did tobin. will this get lost in the weeds in the midst of the testimony? >> hopefully, not. you know the test of an expert opinion is the same as a witness. you have to look at the reasonableness their testimony, whether or not it makes sense and what their bias is in this case. and i think if you started with mr. tobin or dr. tobin telling the jurors that he is doing this for nothing and he spent, i don't know how many hours, and he has seen a million patients, millions of patients, he can tell when somebody dies just by looking at his face, the immediate second when he dies, some of that stuff appears to me at least to be a little

unreasonable and a little bit not true and credible. >> it's a glass half empty and glass half full kind of thing with tobin because, on one hand, okay, he is not getting paid. wow. what a virtuous individual. on the other hand, somebody looks at it and says he is a little too eager to be want to be a part of this case. >> i can't remember how many hours he spent on this and how many times he looked at the video. what i'm thinking in my mind when i was watching his testimony is, gee, my client thomas lane didn't have the luxury of all of that time. he was at the scene during -- the other thing is they call this altercation in the back of a squad car as a minor incident. look at the altercation and watch the vehicle, the squad car

rock back and forth, front-to-back. it does not look like a minor altercation. >> in the end, you must be concerned both for the fate of your client as eric nelson is for derek chauvin. the video, that video is now ingrained. the video of the knee on the neck for nine minutes and 29 seconds. when all is said and done, isn't that what the jury is most going to think about? you get the final word. >> well, in officer chauvin's case, i might agree with you that is the main piece of evidence. i think you couple that with the fact there are no bruises on his neck, according to baker, dr. baker. you can alleviate a lot of that knee on the neck evidence, but i'm not the lawyer representing chauvin and i'm not as concerned about that as the idea that my client, four days on the job,

has the unreasonable duty to intervene after he said twice, shall we roll him over? the first time, within two or three minutes of him being held on the ground. >> i got it. we will get to your guy when we get to that trial. by the way, i thought tobin, the pulmonologist had a ready-made line to the lack of bruising on george floyd's neck in the autopsy which was him saying i go to church and i sit on a hard bench and i don't come home with a bruise, establishing himself as a man of faith and making a significant point. the trials had a lot of those interesting moments. thank you very much, earl gray. i appreciate your time. >> yeah. right. what are your thoughts? tweet me at my facebook page and i'll read responses throughout the program. what do we have, katherine?

okay. just slow the clock down. i have to respond to sonia. i'm an attorney, sonia and paying close attention to this trial. you heard me say to the counsel for one of the other officers that i think the prosecution case has gone in very strong. did you hear that part? and that the only shot perhaps that the defense has is one of causation. and i feel the need in a five or six-minute long segment to lay that out for the audience because i don't know that the audience is hearing it frankly from a lot of other folks who are paying close attention to this trial. i don't want there to be an expectation that ends up causing harm in different communities if this case doesn't turn out the way that everybody seems to think that is a slam dunk and a certainty. i think it's a strong likelihood that derek chauvin is convicted of something, maybe

manslaughter. but we shouldn't presume that will necessarily be the case and because causation is an important aspect of the trial. up ahead, gop congressman matt gaetz is generating weird ha headlines and billboards in florida as the justice department is working to find out if he broke sex trafficking and prostitution laws but florida and weird stories go hand-to-hand. i'll speak to a best-selling author carl highson who has covered his fair share of florida man stories. hwho is q? these transgender female runners with a complaint made by their competitor's to who say the girls have unfair advantage in the sports and more than half of states in the united states

have introduced legislation to translate how girls and transgender girls compete. i'll speak with a female athlete and scholar who has written stenks on this issue. i want to know what you think. go to my website and answer this week's survey question. should transgender female students be restricted from participating in female sports? ♪ ♪i've got the brains you've got the looks♪ ♪let's make lots of money♪ ♪you've got the brawn♪ ♪i've got the brains♪ ♪let's make lots of♪ ♪uh uh uh♪ ♪oohhh there's a lot of opportunities♪ with allstate, drivers who switched saved over $700. saving is easy when you're in good hands. allstate click or call to switch today. scotts turf builder triple action kills weeds, prevents crab grass and feeds your lawn. all three,in just one bag. i like that.

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our teeth sensitivity as well as our gum issues. there's no question it's something that i would recommend. florida, never seems to fail to provide the weirdest, the wildest headlines. look no further than the scandal surrounding one of their congressman. republican congressman matt gaetz-of-florida has lawyered up as the justice department works to determine whether he violate prostitution or sex trafficking

laws. he denied any wrongdoing and special last night at a conservative summer held at trump's mar-a-lago resort. >> i'm built for the battle and i'm not going anywhere. the smears against me range from distortions of my personal life to wild, and i mean wild, conspiracy theories! i won't be intimidated by a lying media and i won't be extorted by a former doj officials and the crooks he is working with. the truth will prevail! >> here to discuss someone who has written about florida scandals for over three decades, carl hiason a recently retired column frist from the "miami herald." he is a best selling author of multiple adult and children's novels all of which are set in florida.

his most recent "squeeze me" it takes place in a post-pandemic palm beach where donald trump is still president. what privilege to have you on the program. quote, there is nothing you can invent in a florida novel that won't eventually come true here. i guess matt gaetz is living proof? >> yeah. he is. it wasn't entirely unexpected, but, you know, i don't think anyone expected he would go full on charlie sheen right off the bat. but every new day, there is going to be a lot of stuff coming out. this is the one time i miss still not doing the column. >> you reflected in your final column, we had it on the screen prematurely. put that back up. because here is what you said about 1976 when you were cutting your teeth. with regard to south florida it was growing into an outragely fertile news mecca. weird, violent drug-soaked and

corrupt. have things changed? >> it's gotten worse. in the sense we have become sort of numb to this sort of news flow, michael. matt gaetz shakes this up a little bit but we have seen so much especially in the way of scandals. if you look back, florida seems to be a place politicians in particular and prominent people come just to get in trouble. you go back to gary hart or you go back to new york governor eliot spitzer cohorting with escorts in florida and the way he is identified is that he refuses to take off his long black socks. that is all he is wearing during his encounters. i seem to remember that. even like general david petraeus, for god's sake, one of the most decorated military men in our lifetime, he comes to florida and immediately gets in trouble for having an affair with his biographer and divulging information that he shouldn't have. so it's just -- we are used to these sort of stumbles. i don't think we are necessarily

used to sort of the spectacular, you know, way that -- matt is going down in flames a bit quicker than most of them do. >> so what is it? is there something in the water? is there something in the gulf? what is it about florida that seems to bring out the weird? >> i think people come here believing they can get away with stuff because so much has been gotten away with. and i think when you have the combination of this kind of arrogance with stupidity. if you've seen some of the interviews and you've seen some of the things gaetz has said, he is not the brightest bulb in the hand chandelier. no master criminal but when you get so numb to it after awhile. i think but, on the other hand, it gives hope to others who think well, he got away with

with it, we could get away with anything in florida. and a lot of has gotten away with here. >> carl, if it's a true carl hiaasen story, the gaetz story, there is a floater in there somewhere. where is the floater? >> it's in the parlance of homicide. that is a dead body floating somewhere. let's hope that the floater in this one is not dead. it's just probably, you know, maybe somebody lounging in a swimming pool they shouldn't have. i think the trail leads, of course, and through this joel greenberg who was a seminal county tax collector. he wasn't just one of matt gaetz's best buddy but he is facing 33 counts and including child sex trafficking. even floridians know if your best buddy gets busted and charged with child sex trafficking, you got problems. even if you're not a politician, you probably need to call a lawyer. and i think gaetz just got around to doing that.

so who knows where the trails is going to lead on this. again, i almost regret having retired a couple of weeks too early. >> a final thought. you've convinced me there is only one state in the union that could appropriately house the donald j. trump presidential library. >> we can't wait to see that. i'm sure it will become some sort of shrine. you know, the whole wasp's nest of that has moved down here now. it's in mar-a-lago. you know, we will see. the question, it's not where in florida, it's where in florida they are actually going to allow it. there will be controversy wherever it goes. it's not going to be welcomed, i don't think think. they are trying to name a highway after him now which is not inappropriate. it's a truck route.

i didn't have that big of an objection. a lot of people seem to think he doesn't deserve even a truck route being named after him at this point. >> nice to have you here. i wish you good things in retirement from the column but not from the books. thank you. >> i'll still be writing. thanks for having me on. >> you got it. let's see what you're saying versus my twitter and facebook pages. this comes from the world of twitter. that is true. to your point about republicans in the house. i made this observation to cuomo earlier in the week. i think that apart from adam kinzinger i think the only wag one who said he has to go. gaetz gets a lot of attention and sharp elbows but they don't

want to take him on because they don't want to alienate the base because they think the base is still on their side. we will see. an hbo documentary filmmaker thinks he is unmasked q, of qanon fame. that story is coming up. plus, west virginia state senators just approved a measure banning transgender girls and women from competing on secondary and college sport teams. at least 30 other states have introduced similar bans this year saying allowing an athlete born male to compete in women's sports gives them unfair advantage. i'm going to talk to a trans-female athlete who will take on those arguments and i want to know what you think so i hope you're going to my website. answer this week's survey question should transgender female students be restricted from participating in female sports?

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modern democratic senator joe manchin, the linchpin in president biden agenda said his membership was strengthened by one major event. >> january 6th changed me and i was very clear with everybody. i never thought in my life. i never read in history books to where our form of government had been attacked at our seat of government which is washington, d.c. and our capitol by our own people. the british did it but not americans. so something told me, wait a minute. pause. hit the pause button. something is wrong. you can't have this many people split to where they want to go to war with each other. >> among those who were ready to go to war that day supporters of the qanon conspiracy theory. now an hbo documentary claims to have an answer as to the long burning question who is q? the mysterious figure who

inspired such division. the documentary explains, q first popped up on four chan message boards in 2017 as an anonymous using claiming to have q clearance. q's cryptic messages reached maintain social networking sites and people bought into the premises that donald trump is waging a secret war against pedophiles in society and hence the belief that trump's election loss would be overturned on january 6th. for years a filmmaker chronicled characters in the q verse piecing together his own set of evidence on q's identity and he concludes that at least some of q's posts were made by ron watkins, whose eight chan board eventually became the home for q posts and this is the climatic moment where he may have said too much. >> thinking back on it, it was basically three years of intelligence training,

teaching -- how to do intelligence work. it's basically what i was doing anonymously before but never as q. >> see that smile? ron had slipped up. he knew it and i knew it. and after three tireless years of cat and mouse? well, ha ha! >> never q, i promise. >> okay. >> because i am not cute. i never was. >> my next guest believes the answer to q's identity not so simple. joan donovan joins me now. research director of the surenstein super on media public and public policy. doctor, why do you think multiple people posting as q and

not just one individual? >> over the years, as you study this, there are lots of different clues and i think that the documentary really shows them -- well,, you know, the posting style changes and the way i look at this is through the infrastructure and it's just not possible to have something as prolific as the qanon phenomenon happening on your website and not know who it is and not be part of the network conspiracy. >> dr. donovan, i'll bet that many watching us now have no idea what goes on or did go on at four chan, eight chan or eight kun. what exactly would you tell them in terms of describing these message boards? >> i would say don't go. and i say that in earnest because what you're going to find is that the thing that made q really alluring as an impit on

these message boards is because they were dropping these secret messages from the government, supposedly. but it was surrounded by nazi propaganda, torture, child pornography. it is not a place that you want to frequent. and, frankly, as a researcher, there is just a lot of things you can't un-see and if you don't have the stomach for that kind of stuff, i wouldn't go. i really wouldn't recommend it. >> why is there seemingly such a draw from some former military? >> there's something about the qanon theory set and especially the way that general flynn plays into the story line that really draws in a lot of military and veterans. and i think at the heart of the conspiracy theory, in and of itself, is this notion that the state is corrupt. and so if you're a veteran or someone in the military, you've built a pretty large piece of

your identity around the idea that you are part of that system that protects democracy, and so when q was happening and there were all of these signs that, you know, that he was talking to the president and the president was talking back to him, that moment, when the president says, yes, democracy is imperiled, that is the moment when these people turned from those that are following the q phenomenon and they become actors in it. >> where are we today? as far as i know, q has not posted since december. what is the state of this situation? >> so i caution people to think about qanon as a separate phenomenon from what we already know about truth or communities or conspiracy communities online. if we think back to 9/11, most

of us, of course, were still getting our news from cable and print and radio. but online, there were several documentaries and means, particularly the meme around jet fuel melting steel beams or that the towers -- there was no plane at all, that it was cgi or the towers were blown up from the inside. if you think about network conspiracy as a set of communities online that all make the story together, they all make the narrative together, then you just -- what up end up seeing is, over the last two decades, you see very clearly that qanon is just a blip in a very long story about deep-state corruption and the role of elites in controlling the minds of the public. >> right. i mean, there seems to be a chicken and egg aspect of this.

these folks were among us and presumably already prone to buying into conspiracy theory before q or qanon ever came along. final comment i wanted to tell you because i had the privilege of having you on my sirius xm radio program. after i conducted my interview with you and went to the phones, there were an alarming number of people who called in and said, hey, i got a brother, i got a sister, a spouse caught up in this and i don't know what to do. because i just can't reach them with any rational thinking. dr. donovan, thank you so much. i appreciate you being here on cnn. >> any time. thank you. let's check in our tweets and facebook comments. what do we have from the world of twitter? why are you giving these nut jobs air time? right, because i created january 6th because i'm willing to talk about it? why? because we have to figure out what the hell is driving these people so we can disabuse them

of this bulls hit! >> still to come, trying to ban transgender athletes in high school sports. i'll speak to a transgender next. please make you're going to my website smerconish.com. answer this question.

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should transgender girls and women be allowed to play school sports on the girls and women's teams? and why did this suddenly become a pressing legislative issue all across america? the debate was largely fueled by two trans-girl high school runners in connecticut terry miller and andrea yearwood who were dominating the state track meets and seen here competing in june of 2019 and finishing first

and second. between 2017 and 2019 they won two championships and this prompted a law. in it the parents of three gender identity matches that on their birth certificate allege that transgender girls have an unfair advantage and seek to get them banned. the case is yet to be decided but where the trump department of justice had offered support for the plaintiffs case, the biden administration has brawn it. in the meantime, 31 states have introduced legislation aimed at barring trans-girls and women from playing girls and women's scholastic sports. several have already passed in arkansas, missouri, tennessee. but none has yet become law. yet, in an associated press survey of two dozen of the states working on such bills, gop lawmakers could cite only a few specific examples in their states of transathletes getting unfair changes. i've got the perfect guest to ask about this complicated

subject. she is a transwoman athlete herself and two times masters track cycling world champion who has spoken and written extensively on this subject and veronica ivy joins me now and a associate professor at the school in charleston. can we be both inclusive and fair, veronica? >> i think that is the right question to ask, in fact. fairness and inclusion are not in opposition to each other. inclusion is fairness. so i like to talk about, for example, the international olympic committee has an olympic charter and it has seven fundamental principles of olympicism and it begins that participation in sports is a human right. and they mean competitive sport. so inclusion and nondiscrimination is part of the olympic spirit of mutual understanding and fair play, it

means and since 2003, ioc has had trans-inclusion policies. since that 2003 policy, 2004 olympics through 2018 sochi, we have had over 54,000 olympians and zero trans-athletes ever even qualified. there hasn't been a single elite athlete that is trans, that has won a world championship. mine is an age group, for example. so we are seeing zero evidence of advantage for trans-girls and trans-women. >> why is this then getting the amount of -- i mean, every day there is another story, there is another headline, there is another state. if there aren't that many trans-athletes involved, what accounts for this? >> yeah. so take me, for example. i am literally the only trans-woman track sprinter in the world at my level. so if we want to suggest a nonstarter separate, but equal

category of trans-only, then i would literally be competing against myself at the world elite level. like, it's a nonstarter argument. why are we seeing this? frankly, it's a culture war by the republicans. i think they don't actually care about sport. largely, this is a proxy war for having lost the bathroom bill fight. remember, the backlash over north carolina's hb-2, for example. this sew lost the bathroom bills and they have lost the ability to exclude us from bathrooms and certain public facilities. they have now turned their attention to sport. so, for example, when donald trump jr. hate tweets about me and that my participating in sport is the end 6 women's sport, i am quite certain he didn't know masters age group velodrom track cycling was even a thing. he doesn't care about women's sport. most of these people don't support women's sport in any sense. they often mock like the wnba. >> what is the answer to the

connecticut moms who say, hey, my daughter can't compete and we showed the film clip of those two track stars in connecticut. what is the response to the parents who say my kids have no shot, they can't compete with these trans-female athletes? >> well, it's not because they are trans, that these athletes couldn't win. it's they weren't fast enough. so, for example, neither of these trans-athletes became national champions. for example, i know one of the plaintiffs got onto a division i college school, but she failed to make the roster for the track and field team, even though some of other freshmen did. is she going to sue her other sis-gender teammates for being faster than her? it's just not because they are trans, that they were winning, they were just faster. >> i read the connecticut complaints and i know this gets

into the werdeds in a hurry. those born male have a natural physiological advantage that also includes different levels of testosterone. you snow the argument. your response to that is what? >> it's a nonsense argument. depends on how much time you want to let me get into the weeds, because i can literally spends hours on this. >> how about 30 seconds? ha ha shra. >> testosterone has zero impact on your athletic performance and we know that. but we didn't know that until 2013 because everyone assumed testosterone is why men are bigger, stronger, faster. while we study it there is no relation. every body produces a different amount and when add to it

through doping, there is a performance advantage. when you take up a the natural amount and drop below it, there tends to be a performance disadvantage. for example, in one study, they found in this elite set of male athletes, some men below the women's average for testosterone were competing at no competitive disadvantage with men that had 40 times as much testosterone. >> i've learned a lot. thank you, veronica. to be continued. it's a complicated subject. >> thank you. let's check in our tweets and facebook comments. remember, this is also the focus of today's survey question. the question is on your screen. i think what you're saying, and andrea, you think the question should be what about a

sis-gender female and her rights to compete on a fair playing surface? look. we are going to get to this in a moment with a result of the survey question, okay? some of your best and worst tweets are upcoming. this is i wave worded it. should transgender female students be restricted from participating in female sports? ♪ ♪i've got the brains you've got the looks♪ ♪let's make lots of money♪ ♪you've got the brawn♪ ♪i've got the brains♪ ♪let's make lots of♪ ♪uh uh uh♪ ♪oohhh there's a lot of opportunities♪ with allstate, drivers who switched saved over $700. saving is easy when you're in good hands. allstate click or call to switch today. what's the #1 retinol brand allstate used most by dermatologists? tah-dah, it's neutrogena®

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responded to the survey question this week at smerconish.com. should transgender female students be restricted from participating in female sports? hit me with the result. 57% day yes. interesting. 57% of more than 21,000 say yes, they should be restricted. i mean, unfortunately, it's like a binary choice. i would love to think there's area for compromise. i always like to see shades of purple in these discussions. but in this one, i don't know that there can be. what do we have in terms of social media reaction this week? smerconish, i'm absolutely disgusted by the number of people voting that trans girls should be restricted from female sports. these small-minded people don't understand transgender and need to be educated. i don't know that i understand all the dynamics here. it's confusing stuff. but the hard part is we don't want to discriminate, right?

we want to be inclusionary, and by the same token, we also want to be fair to all participants, including cisgender females. hit me with another one. what else do we have? no candidate for mensa is my new favorite quote. and you know who it was said about. not me, thank goodness. one more. i think i have time. here it is. saying what we all think about crazy qanon cult, needed that at 9:40, says lauren. i probably shouldn't have said that, lauren. do you think i'll be reprimanded for it? i forgot myself. i thought i was on siriusxm and not cnn. thank you so much for watching. see you next week. so you can enjoy it even if you're sensitive to dairy. so anyone who says lactaid isn't real milk is also saying mabel here isn't a real cow. and she really hates that.

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good morning thank you. we are grateful to have your company on this saturday, april 10th. i'm christi paul. >> i'm victor blackwell. you are in the "cnn newsroom" and it is a crucial time in the race between the coronavirus variants and the vaccines, and what happens now will have major implications for what our summer will look like. >> more than 80,000 new covid cases were added yesterday. that's the third day in a row the u.s. has logged that many cases or more. the model from the university of washington's institute for health metrics and evaluation forecasts more than 618,000 deaths by august 1st. that toll jumps to more than 697,000 if people who are fully vaccinated return to pre-pandemic levels of mobility, let's say.