'None of this adds up': Expert shreds Trump's contradictory statements on accountability
Former President Donald Trump's various immunity defenses make no sense taken together, said former acting solicitor general Neal Katyal on MSNBC Friday.
This comes after the Supreme Court agreed to take up a review of Trump's defense, potentially punting his January 6 case to after the election — a move that troubles Katyal, despite his professed deep admiration for the court as an institution.
"I saw someone wrote something defending the Supreme Court schedule and it said, so far this is proceeding like a normal trial," said anchor Chris Hayes. "I thought, what are you talking about, 'normal'? First of all, normal criminal defendants don't get to claim presidential immunity, because it has only happened literally one time in American history. And number two, of course it's not normal. None of this is normal. There's no apples-to-apples comparison to make here."
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"Yeah, and I think that's exactly right," said Katyal. "The one thing I would add, the essence of our Constitution, what it's about, what we fought the American Revolution about ... is about one big principle, which is that nobody is above the law, whether you are called King George III or whether you are called Donald Trump" — and Trump is endlessly claiming to be above the law.
"So you remember Trump first said, when the Mueller report came out, he said, look, I'm a sitting president, you can't indict me under the Constitution, you have to wait 'til I leave office," Katyal continued. "Then voters voted him out of office. He committed crimes to try to stay in office on January 6th. And he then says, you can't prosecute me for those crimes because I'm still sitting president. So then we try and impeach him, which he says at that point you can do because you can't indict him you could only impeach a sitting president. So we do that, and he says, gets his lawyers to say, oh no, you can't impeach a president at the end of his term, you've got to indict him after he leaves office. So then we do exactly that. Jack Smith does that. He indicts him after he leaves office. And then he says, oh no, you can't indict me, you have to have impeached me first."
"None of this adds up in any sense to anything that is anything but Soviet," Katyal added. "And it's certainly not the American Constitution. And so that's the stakes. Do the American public really want — I mean forget about whether he did it or not, just these claims he is making, I think, are making him constitutionally ineligible to be president. He's spitting on our sacred document."
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