Donald Trump faces so much legal peril that it can be hard to keep up, so legal experts compiled an analysis so thorough that it stretches out to book length.
Two of those experts appeared on MSNBC's "Morning Joe," where they gave a summary of the 91 criminal counts Trump faces in four jurisdictions, along with the lawsuits alleging fraud, defamation, sexual abuse and violation of civil rights, and the various appeals he's made in all those cases.
"What is interesting, when we were writing this, we were noticing that this is about criminality that is charged for before he was president, while he was president, and after he was president," said former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann, a frequent guest on the network. "This is an incredible array of crimes. Let's take the Florida case, where he recently filed another motion saying that he is immune. Of course, that happened after he was president."
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"If you think the D.C. case was outlandish, to say, 'I can kill people without being criminally charged for that,' he is now saying even after I am president, 'I can do it,'" Weissmann added. "They're not great arguments but they buy him delay. We're sitting here today waiting for the Supreme Court to decide whether Judge [Tanya] Chutkan can give it a green light. That is what he gets even making arguments that are frivolous."
The totality of the allegations against Trump and the defenses he's offered are disturbing for a former president who's actively seeking a return to office, Weissmann said.
"Even though we're keeping an eye on what will ultimately happen in criminal trials, Donald Trump now is telling us who he is," he said. "By the arguments he is making, saying the president should not be held to be criminally liable for, you know, killing people, where he can take classified documents and that should be legal. That is telling us now something about who is running for office."
Weissmann expressed doubt that the ex-president would stand trial before the election in Florida for mishandling classified documents or for attempting to subvert the his 2020 loss in Georgia, but Trump will stand trial next month in Manhattan and quite likely in Washington, D.C.
"Leaving aside what happens in terms of whether it is a conviction or not, one of the things that will happen, that obviously Donald Trump does not want to happen, is there will be facts," Weissmann said. "Facts laid out in court for people to see, for us to cover, so what the public is seeing is not just Donald Trump's spin and what he wants to say publicly, which can be false. This is one where it'll be incumbent on the government to prove its case, but there will be that daily drip, drip, drip of factual evidence in both the Manhattan case and the D.C. case when that goes. I expect both of those will happen before the election."
Watch the video below or at this link.
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