'Just like Watergate': Ex-prosecutor says 'Trump himself' will fall after his lawyers

The ship is sinking with everybody clinging for a plea deal life-vest.

Former federal prosecutor and historian John Flannery foresees a reckoning now that so many in former President Donald Trump's orbit have flipped to become either state or federal witnesses for the prosecution.

"The rats are leaving the ship, you know," Flannery told Ari Melber during a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC's "The Beat."

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In the last few days, Trump has had to bear witness to key confidants, including his former attorneys Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis along with former Chief of Staff Mark Meadows -- all cartwheel for prosecutions in some of his criminal cases in return for dodging jail and singing in court against him.

"The bigger picture is: this is substantial," Flannery said on the show. "This moves the earth."

For Flannery, who prosecuted federal cases, he sees direct parallels to the implications of Trump to when President Richard Nixon was outed for his hand in the Watergate scandal.

"We're at a point where people are paying for what they did wrong, and we can feel the movement, the vectors, are moving toward a place where all of those who were involved are going to be just like Watergate over time," Flannery explained. "They're going to go down, including Trump himself.

He suspects that some attorneys get lost in their own hubris.

"It's a combination of things," he told Melber. "I don't know that they're born again as is suggested by Ellis' thing," referring to Jenna Ellis sobbing when she pleaded guilty and expressed "deep remorse" in the Georgia election subversion case.

"It's hard to believe a person who studied the law, who's been talking about public issues and so forth could have just made a mistake," he added. "The ambition we have as young people has to be harbored and to be focused in a good way."

"And I think too many of these people, just like Watergate, get sucked into having the ambition and power and access, and they forget all the rules that brought them to where they are."

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