During a discussion Sunday on ex-Biden official Jen Psaki’s MSNBC show, Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) accused some Justices on the U.S. Supreme Court of evident interest in just delaying trial proceedings implicating former President Donald Trump.
“Yeah,” Raskin said when asked about the possibility. “If you don’t believe that, you’re too innocent to be let out of the house by yourself at this point. I mean this is a court driven by both Trump nominees and Bush nominees, and neither of those guys was elected with a popular vote-majority. So we’ve got a Supreme Court that is representing the choices of minority presidents, and they have been driving very hard to overturn a whole series of precedents.”
Raskin is the top-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee and known as an expert in Constitutional law.
The nation’s highest court recently agreed to hear further arguments amid appeals from Trump claiming that he holds legal protections by mere virtue of once serving as president that should stop a key criminal case against him. The underlying criminal case from Special Counsel Jack Smith at the federal Justice Department deals with Trump’s pushes after the last presidential election to stay in power despite losing to Joe Biden.
Trump and his team allege, in general terms, that he should be free from even the possibility of criminal consequences for actions taken as part of his official duties as president. That’s where Trump groups what he was doing after the 2020 presidential race concluded, though carrying his ambitions to fruition would have undone the collective impact of tens of millions of documented votes for Joe Biden.
Trump has already lost multiple times when trying to present these arguments at lower levels — but the longer the dispute persists, the longer that the anticipated trial in these proceedings is delayed, giving Trump somewhat of a win in the meantime. He has often faced accusations of leaning on mere delay as a legal strategy.
