No wonder xfinity mobile is one of the fastest growing mobile services. you really shouldn t walk out the front door without it. switch today at xfinitymobile.com. so we ve never had a federally indicted former president before. we are in new territory now. that means we have no idea exactly what to expect tomorrow when donald trump is scheduled to make his first court appearance in miami. we re going to have special coverage tomorrow on msnbc starting at 10:00 a.m. tomorrow evening i ll be back with you for our primetime special coverage from 8:00 to 10:00i will see you then. that s gonna do it for me for a few minutes, before i joined the last word with lawrence o donnell as well. good evening, lawrence. good evening, rachel. i am so excited to be able to have you come over here. and andrew weizmann is gonna be the first guest in the studio. he s actually on his way at the
Campaign because of this indictment. i will never drop out of this campaign. he said this weekend i will continue to run for president not only after i m indicted. i will continue to run for president even if i m convicted. that is what trump is saying now. in agnew s case? you just heard him say it. i will not resign if indicted. very same kind of pledge. but think about how that would work in practical terms. i mean, think about that with the agnew case. especially given that, you know, with benefit of hindsight we now know that nixon was out. nixon didn t get to the end of his term. he was forced out by the watergate scandal. think about what that would have meant with agnew not resigning if indicted. all right? they ve got all the evidence against him. justice department indicts him. he says he won t resign if indicted so okay. let s say they pressed on. they went to trial. he would very likely be convicted on dozens of felony
Nixon was going down. the watergate scandal was getting worse and worse and worse. nixon was pretty unhealthy by then in lots of ways. his behavior was erratic and strange, which is something that top officials of the justice department saw personally in their interactions with nixon including the attorney general himself. i mean, it just seemed like very good odds that if nixon didn t keel over there was a very good prospect that he was going to be out. he was going to resign or be forced out of office by impeachment, which would of course make his vice president president. and his vice president, the justice department believed, had committed dozens of felonies and they had the evidence to back it up. so just think about that moment in time for a second. think of that moment in time in relation to where we are today with trump about to be arraigned on 37 felony counts tomorrow. i mean, we ve got trump saying right now, i will not suspend my
That at the time for what was going on there, that was the right call. donald trump is a contender. he is not in elective office. he may become the republican nominee. betting is that he will. he may or may not get elected. at the time of the election if he is the republican nominee, even if he is elected, he could have been tried for this espionage case. he could well have other indictments pending against him. it could even be possible he would be convicted and sentenced to jail and you d have the specter. here is where there is a similarity, rachel. you have the specter of president trump running the white house while doing time in the big house. that would be terrible. however, it is not watergate. we re not in a constitutional crisis. the fact that trump would become president if there is a fair election and he is elected, i
Counts. they had very hard evidence against him. so he would be convicted. he d get sentenced to jail quite possibly. it was dozens of felonies. not like espionage act felonies but still it was bad. if he doesn t resign he goes on trial. he gets convicted. and then sentenced to jail. then he is the vice president of the united states in jail. and from jail what the justice department is expecting about nixon comes true. nixon goes poof from the presidency. so now post nixon we ve got the new president governing from jail. from federal prison. or maybe now that agnew is president he tries to pardon himself from prison? but nobody really knows how that would work. can you do that? would people obey the order that he proclaimed himself pardoned? it would be chaos. so what do you do in that circumstance if you are the u.s. department of justice? what do you do as the justice