MSNBC host Rachel Maddow said Wednesday on “The ReidOut” that former President Donald Trump could make a plea deal vowing not to run for president again to avoid jail time.
Anchor Joy Reid said, “What are the chances that Donald Trump, and I had not thought about until you said it, that instead of going through with this trial he takes a plea with the vowed to not run for president again like Spiro Agnew did in the 70s.”
Maddow said, “I don’t know what the odds are.”
She continued, “I can’t imagine him pleading guilty to anything. Who among us wants to spend too much time floating around inside his mind even proverbially? So who knows what’s gonna happen. But if this is as strong a case as the indictment makes it look and that’s the prosecutions best-case, it will get challenged in court. It will be an adversarial process. We will see how strong the defenses. But if the indictment is that strong and the Justice Department is going to treat this as a like case compared to other people who have been charged under the Espionage Act then he is looking at jail time. What would on Trump do to avoid jail time? I guess, I literally suppose, that he would do anything. And if it’s going to come to him avoiding jail time, now that this indictment exists he’s either going to have to win in court defending yourself against the charges by saying, ‘Yes I did it,’ is not a good defense. So how else can you avoid jail time? You can plea in exchange for leniency.”
Maddow added, “Spiro Agnew used that is a get out of jail free card. It’s not just that he was vice president, it was the prosecutors assumed that he was about to become president because Nixon was teetering, they were right. In order to keep Agnew out, they traded him jail time for his resignation.”
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