MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan said Sunday the “rest of the world is probably wondering why” Donald Trump hasn’t been prosecuted yet, arguing that other nations routinely prosecute former leaders.
“Speaking as a relatively new citizen to this country, one thing that is uniquely American about [the country] is that no former president of the United States has ever been charged with a criminal offense,” said Hasan, who was born in England and became a U.S. citizen in 2020. “While that may seem normal to you, it is not normal everywhere else in the world.”
“Former leaders and countries across the globe are being prosecuted and imprisoned all the time. Really,” he added, citing Israel’s corruption trial for its former Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, France’s three-year prison sentence for its former President Nicolas Sarkozy and Peru’s history of prosecuting its former presidents on corruption charges.
Hasan pointed to a question posed at a recent White House press briefing by a reporter, who asked if Joe Biden’s administration was concerned about the “signal that it sends to the rest of the world” that FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate as part of the Department of Justice’s criminal investigation into whether he illegally took and stored classified documents at the Florida resort.
“The rest of the world is probably wondering why he hasn’t been prosecuted yet,” Hasan said.
“Why we are a weird global outlier when it comes to giving former leaders some kind of blanket immunity from prosecution?”
Trump is being investigated under the Espionage Act. The Justice Department recovered sensitive materials potentially containing national security secrets from his home in an Aug. 8 search following multiple failed previous efforts to retrieve them.
