Former Watergate prosecutor Jill Wine-Banks can’t understand why Donald Trump wasn’t immediately indicted after leaving the White House.
Speaking to MSNBC on Sunday with Vanity Fair reporter Molly Jong-Fast, Wine-Banks explained that even before Jan. 6 and the documents scandal, Trump had a list of crimes involving obstruction of justice and campaign finance violations linked to the Stormy Daniels hush money payments.
“I think we need to hold the former president responsible for all of his crimes and not just because there are all of the things that led up to Jan. 6th, the big lie, and all of the things that founded, including trying to disassemble the Department of Justice, trying to have fake electors, trying to pressure Mike Pence, all of those things are part of Jan. 6, Mar-a-Lago is another element,” she explained. “But that does not take away from the crimes that he may have committed before that.”
She confessed she didn’t quite know why Trump has managed to escape any accountability thus far.
“And it has always been strange to me that he was not indicted as soon as he left the presidency,” said Wine-Banks. “Because he was named in the indictment of Michael Cohen, as the ‘Person Number One.’ It was said that the crime was committed for the benefit of ‘Person Number One.’ And that was clearly him. So, I think that it is just sort of cleaning up the statute of limitations on that is more than likely to run quickly, and so it will get more attention now because of the statute of limitations. It should not in any way interfere with all the other things that are going on.”
Jong-Fast noted that Pence and other 2024 GOP candidates have been trying to figure out how to “strip away the Trump base from Trump by being not anti-Trump, but not necessarily pro-Trump.”
She said that the Republicans think that it’ll work for them, but they’re wrong.
“I think that it is very unlikely that the people who were chanting that he should be hung are going to be his perspective voters,” said Jong-Fast. “I don’t think that it matters what he does, I don’t think it matters to win those voters. He’s trying to have it both ways, you know, he’s not brave enough to stand up to Trump. He doesn’t want the death threats from the Trump people, but in the same sense, those people will never forgive him for not overturning the 2020 election. So, I think that they are afraid to confront the base, until they confront the base and until they take that pain, the base belongs to Trump.”
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