MSNBC hosts Joy Reid and Chris Hayes weighed in on the Thursday announcement that former President Donald Trump has been indicted.
Trump announced on Truth Social that he has been indicted on charges apparently related to his handling of classified documents. Trump posted that he has been summoned to appear at a federal courthouse in Miami, Florida, next Tuesday.
Reid said during an episode of “All In With Chris Hayes” that it was a sad night, because the American people are observing the “denigration” of the highest office in the country through Trump’s alleged actions.
“It is a night of pathos not joy in the sense that the American Republic is having to witness the sort of denigration of the presidency, or the former presidency in the form of the apparently now-confirmed indictment of Donald Trump,” Reid said. (RELATED: Trump Says He’s Been Indicted In Truth Social Post)
“There’s something so different about the Manhattan district attorney indicting Donald Trump for actions that he took in the run up to him becoming the president in that hush money payment scheme. We have a multi-jurisdictional form of justice. They’re different jurisdictions for different crimes. The United States Department of Justice, I mean this is the sort of republic at its, you know, defending itself against itself in some senses here,” Hayes said.
Hayes argued that the indictment served as a test of the “guardrails” and “binding constraint” of the law.
“The reality is that if a former president can commit any crime, then we have a king and not a president. Then it means that by becoming president you achieve immunity from the law. And I think the test here for Merrick Garland and the Justice Department was whether or not they were gonna essentially immunize Donald Trump from any and all conduct,” Reid said.
Reid emphasized that the federal government had an obligation to enforce the rule of law against a former president, and doing otherwise would signal that “by getting this one job that you have for four or eight years, you are now free to conduct any level of criminality, and including criminality than involves our national security.”
Reid claimed that Trump’s conduct regarding Jan. 6 was so “unimaginable” that if he hadn’t been indicted she would have “started to question whether there was a rule of law.”
“I think that this is the natural outcome when you do the things that Donald Trump has done. And so I’m actually relieved that our system actually does have what do appear to be real guardrails. And as you said, that the executive branch is willing to act against its former self,” Reid said.
Trump has been under federal investigation led by Special Counsel Jack Smith over his alleged handling of classified documents in his private Mar-a-Lago home. The former president allegedly ignored demands requesting that he return the documents, The New York Times reported.