Morning Joe thrashes Trump's 'lawfare' wails: He ran for president to avoid prosecution

Donald Trump complains that all of his criminal prosecutions and civil lawsuits are intended to prevent him from getting re-elected as president, but MSNBC's Joe Scarborough said he was only running again to avoid the consequences of those legal actions against him.

The quadruple-indicted ex-president has so far been found liable for sexual abuse, defamation and fraud and fined more than half a billion dollars, and last week he was convicted on all 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up other crimes, and the "Morning Joe" host reminded viewers that he's been saying since before the 2020 election that Trump would seek office to avoid accountability.

"In 2019 on this show, we said if Donald Trump lost, he would run again for re-election to avoid all the prosecutions against him," Scarborough said. "When he ran, there was open discussion about why is Donald Trump running again? The answer was, because if he runs again, he will be able to say that all of these prosecutions that are coming are politically influenced. So we all saw this coming, people all saw this coming."

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"For him to now say, 'Oh, they're only coming after me,' for his allies to say, 'Oh, they're only coming after him because he's running for president,' actually has that backwards," Scarborough added. "He ran for president because he knew he was going to be prosecuted."

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Trump is widely expected to order his next attorney general to end the federal prosecutions against him for mishandling classified materials and attempting to overturn his election loss, and both he and his allies have openly threatened to target his enemies, including law enforcement officials and President Joe Biden, with prosecution if he returns to the White House.

"That's the bet, if he wins, it all goes away, and it's actually outside of the case that was just decided with the 34 felony guilty verdicts against him last week," said co-host Willie Geist. "He successfully has used delay tactics, his team has, to probably get these pushed past the election. He thinks if he wins, [attorney general] Merrick Garland is out, he puts, I don't know, Don Jr. in as attorney general or something and everything goes away."

Trump renewed his threats to target his enemies, including his 2016 rival Hillary Clinton, with prosecution in an interview Tuesday night on Newsmax, and MAGA influencer Steve Bannon says right-wing lawyers are scheming legal justifications to go after prosecutors who have charged and convicted the ex-president.

"We've learned that when he makes a threat like this, we have to take it seriously," said Jonathan Lemire, the White House bureau chief for Politico. "What's differently here, there's been Republican anger for years now, they claim the witch hunts against Donald Trump. What's different about this verdict is how out in the open it is, and how they're not trying to be subtle. There's no euphemisms here, there's no sort of like, let's be clever."

"They're flat-out saying, we are going to go after those who have done this to Donald Trump," Lemire added. "Yes, Steve Bannon talking about [Manhattan district attorney] Alvin Bragg. We have speaker [Mike] Johnson, the House speaker saying they're going to look at the Department of Justice and try to defund a lot of what it can do as payback for the Biden DOJ going after Donald Trump. Now, of course, there's a limit to what they can actually do, but the threat is still there, and it erodes America's faith in our institutions."

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