Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal said Donald Trump’s “nonsense” legal maneuvers aren’t working ― and predicted that the former president’s first criminal trial will begin as scheduled next Monday.
“As someone who actually pays his taxes, I’m glad to see April 15th actually having some consequence for Donald Trump,” he told MSNBC’s Jen Psaki on Sunday.
Katyal dismissed an effort by Trump’s attorneys to force the judge in the hush money trial to step aside with claims of bias.
“His legal strategy is first lie, then deny, then delay,” he said. “And we’re on the delay phase of this, it’s his last-ditch effort.”
But he predicted it won’t work ― and that Trump will soon make the wrong kind of history.
“I strongly suspect Donald Trump will be convicted at the end of that trial,” he said. “That will be the first former president to be convicted criminally.”
Katyal said Trump’s efforts to undermine all of his various cases won’t succeed, either.
“Legally, none of this is going anywhere. That’s the beauty of the American criminal justice system: It’s 12 jurors, it’s rules of evidence and the like, and these kinds of nonsense arguments will go nowhere,” he said. “That’s why I suspect he’ll be convicted.”
He said even having a friendly judge in the stolen documents case in Florida likely won’t help Trump much for the same reasons.
“If it does go to trial, he’s gonna be convicted almost certainly there as well,” he said.
See his full conversation with Psaki below:
Source Agencies