Jen Psaki Asks If Trump’s Campaign Now Mostly ‘About Keeping Him Out Of Prison?’

MSNBC host and former White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki asked Rep. Stacey Plaskett (D-V.I.) if ex-President Donald Trump’s campaign is now mostly “about keeping him out of prison?”

Trump announced Tuesday that he’s about to be indicted in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s conduct surrounding the 2020 election and the January 6 attack on the Capitol — which would be his third indictment. At the same time, Trump has been funneling donations to a PAC that has been paying his legal expenses.

On Sunday’s edition of MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki, the host asked Plaskett, a former impeachment manager, if Trump’s campaign is mainly about funding his criminal defense:

PSAKI: I wanted to ask you, because this week, there was also a lot of news on the legal front as it relates to the former president. And the Washington Post published a piece that really stuck out to me about how intertwined Donald Trump’s campaign has become with his legal defense. According to the piece, just over half of the money he raised last quarter went to an affiliated PAC that is footing his legal bills. Your Republican colleagues continue to support him, of course, but is this campaign becoming increasingly about keeping him out of prison? And how is that even allowed for him to use so much of that money for his own legal defense?

PLASKETT: Well, I don’t know the FEC rules with regard to that. But I do recognize that what Donald Trump has done is telling his base, that him being in jail is them being in jail. You know, trying to say that the insurrectionists and those who have been charged rightly by our FBI, by the Department of Justice, for the crimes that they committed are, in fact, them being put to crimes. And so it’s this fear factor of their own lives that he’s trying to intertwine himself with, when Jen, we know that his life is nothing like a regular Americans like.

The kind of privileges and the kinds of work that his children had been able to do, you know, utilizing the White House for their own financial gain is nothing like what should — what happened in regular Americans life. But he has really driven his base to believe that and imprisoning him is imprisoning them, which is absolutely ludicrous. What the Department of Justice is doing is saying that no one is above the law.

Watch above via MSNBC’s Inside With Jen Psaki.