MSNBC legal analyst Neal Katyal said Wednesday on “Deadline” New York Attorney General Letitia James’s civil lawsuit filing also presents a “good” criminal case.
Katyal said, “On page two, the attorney general isolated a list of federal crimes she thought were potentially violated. And the thing this lawsuit did was collect all the reporting from our friends on this show, but then add to it all the evidence from the accountants, the evidence from the CFO and others, and it’s tremendous. It’s a case based on a huge amount of paperwork, which is unlike a lot of the other investigations that Trump has faced.”
He continued, “This New York one is a civil case, so the standard of proof is lower, but the other piece about it is all these times that Donald Trump and his family took the Fifth Amendment, hundreds of times in the New York attorney general’s investigation. In a criminal case, because of our Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination, you can’t have some sort of inference when someone takes the Fifth Amendment, but in a civil case, you can.”
Katyal added, “So if you are a prosecutor, you might actually want to start and let that civil lawsuit unfold first and then bring the criminal case later. It seems like a good criminal case at this point, based on what I’m seeing in the complaint.”
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