Former chairman of the Republican National Committee, Michael Steele, expressed his frustration at the legal hoops being jumped through all because former President Donald Trump can’t stop talking about the players in his election interference case.
Steele appeared Monday on MSNBC after appellate court judges questioned Trump’s attorneys over why they shouldn’t reinstate the limited gag order on their client imposed by Judge Tanya Chutkan. Her reasoning for the order was that Trump’s language and social media posts about Special Counsel Jack Smith and Chutkan’s staff presented a “danger to the administration of justice.”
“If I’m called in front of a judge and I say something disparaging, I’m just going to claim free speech political commentary,” Steele said sarcastically. “Look, we’re setting a whole different standard for this guy. We’re contorting ourselves in ways that we ordinarily wouldn’t have.” He continued:
I mean, when did we have this conversation? When did we have to do this? Even when Glenn [Kirschner] and others were prosecuting high profile mobsters, you didn’t have to deal with this level of crap. And I hate to put it in that context, but that’s how a lot of us Americans are looking at this and saying, “What are we doing here?”The guy needs to shut his mouth up! He needs to obey what the
judge tells them to do and do it! But he doesn’t, and then everybody falls all over themselves to try to fix it so that they don’t have to get sideways with the Constitution or sideways with him. It’s kind of black lettering in one sense. I mean, be quiet! Don’t say anything about a judge’s clerk. I don’t know how complicated that is! But, here we are.
Steele concluded by saying, “Put him in jail if he keeps running his mouth, ’cause that’s where I would be, that’s where you would be, that’s where Glenn would be if we violated the gag order. We would not be having stuff funneled up to the Supreme Court through the appellate process.”
Watch the clip above via MSNBC.