A possible criminal case against Trump 'looks like a good case so far': former White House lawyer
Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal addressed New York Attorney General Letitia James's recent announcement that she was filing civil charges won't land Donald Trump in prison. One of the things that James said while giving her briefing about the 200-page legal filing is that there are criminal actions that could be charged and that she was referring it to the Southern District of New York for their investigation.
Speaking to MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace, Katyal explained that there might be serious criminal probes forthcoming.
"On page two, the attorney general isolated a list of federal crimes she thought were potentially violated," he said. "And the thing this lawsuit did was collect all the reporting from our friends on this show, but then add to it all the evidence from the accountants, the evidence from the CFO and others, and it's tremendous. It's a case based on a huge amount of paperwork, which is unlike a lot of the other investigations that Trump has faced, where his allies can just make up stories to protect him. This is based on cold facts with paperwork that is under the Trump Organization."
He referred back to the reports that Trump was flushing documents down the toilet at the White House and it clogged the pipes requiring plumbers. Katyal joked Trump probably wishes he could flush some financial statements down the toilet again.
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"There's a big difference between what's going on in this attorney general suit and a criminal one," Katyal explained. "And one part of it is the burden of proof. Which, in a criminal case, is beyond a reasonable doubt. The very high standard that the prosecution has to show for all sorts of good reasons before you can put someone in jail. But there's a -- and the civil case is just a preponderance of the evidence, 51 percent or something like that. As I say, this New York one is a civil case, so, the standard of proof is lower, but the other piece about it is all these times that Donald Trump and his family took the fifth amendment. Hundreds of times in the New York attorney general's investigation. In a criminal case, because of our Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, you can't have some sort of inference when someone takes the Fifth Amendment, but in a civil case, you can."
So, Katyal suggested, that a prosecutor might let the civil lawsuit unfold before taking the next steps.
"It seems like a good criminal case at this point, based on what I'm seeing in the complaint," he closed.
See the exchange below or at the link here.
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