Former top Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on Friday bemoaned the legal system's failure to hold Donald Trump accountable.
The normally optimistic law professor who served on special counsel Robert Mueller's team told MSNBC's Joy Reid that Trump's broad immunity from the Supreme Court saved him from the justice the American people deserved.
Reid read an excerpt from the filing from Trump's lawyers demanding that the federal court take over the New York state fraud trial.
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"Accordingly, President Trump respectfully requests that the court (i) accept this Second Removal Notice (ii) confirm that Justice [Juan] Merchan may not sentence President Trump during litigation over this Second Removal Notice..."
Weissmann explained, "The quote we are really talking about — [zoom] the lens out — is the American legal system has failed. This is one where, unlike other legal systems around the globe that have managed to hold political leaders to account, we have not. Donald Trump has figured out a way to play the system, and he's been aided and abetted by the Supreme Court, by Judge [Aileen] Cannon, to slow things down so that the actual accountability is — whether guilty or not guilty — that day of reckoning is put off."
He explained that the Manhattan hush money case did go to trial, and there was a ruling. Now, Trump wants to move everything to federal court, where he could then return to the Supreme Court and seek a dismissal.
"But this is really sort of a grade," the NYU Law School professor said. "I'm a professor, so I give grades. This is sort of an F for how we fare compared to so many other sorts of so-called Western democracies that do actually know how to hold people to account."
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