CNN’s Jim Acosta Declares: Trump Has ‘Played the Legal System Like a Fiddle’

CNN carried the breaking news out of the Supreme Court on Monday that all nine justices ruled in favor of keeping former President Donald Trump on the ballot after Colorado (and other states) attempted to ban him. Anchor Jim Acosta acknowledged the victory for Trump while declaring that “Trump has sort of played the legal system like a fiddle.”

This particular case was seen as a somewhat predictable victory for Trump, but it is far from his only case on file. Though, Acosta argued, Trump has been able to manipulate the legal system by delaying his cases, possibly past the November election. Acosta talked to one of Trump’s former White House lawyers Jim Schultz about his former boss’s legal tactics, starting their conversation with this observation:

[I]t seems as though Trump, whatever you want to say about him, has sort of played the legal system like a fiddle over the last couple of years. He’s thrown the kitchen sink into the gears of America’s judicial system, and it’s panned out for him just about every step of the way.

After some discussion on whether or not Trump was an insurrectionist — the SCOTUS ruling conspicuously did not mention anything related to Trump being an insurrectionist, it was a decision on whether or not individual states could disqualify a federal candidate from appearing on a ballot citing the Insurrection Act — Acosta went into the upcoming decision on presidential immunity that is set to come before the court in April:

Acosta: But I mean, Jim, you bring up the immunity question, and that hearing apparently is going to be coming up in late April. That also isn’t that kind of a win for Trump in that it really pushes back the January 6th, the Jack Smith-January 6th case here in Washington, to a point where it may not even happen in time before the general election? And so all of these issues that you’re talking about, you’re saying, well, you know, Jack Smith built a good case and so on, and there are some fair questions in there, but we may never get to that.

Schultz: Well, we may never get to it if Donald Trump was elected president and the case does not move forward prior to the election, right? And that’s the risk associated with the Supreme Court taking up the immunity case instead of just doing nothing on it and letting that circuit court case stand, that’s going to have the impact of perhaps pushing the trial out, I believe the earliest we’re going to see it is August.

And then you get into this, you know, does the Department of Justice want to take up this case that’s going to potentially impact the outcome of an election? My sense is they’re going to try to forge forward with that. And I’m not sure that Tanya Chutkan, Judge Chutkan is going to give a care about the upcoming election. She’s going to want to administer justice in this case one way or the other. So I do believe that we we see this prior to the election, but it’s going to be darn close, and there’s going to be a whole lot of controversy surrounding it. Whichever decision Judge Chutkan makes in terms of when this thing’s heard.

Acosta also pushed Schultz on Trump being “treated differently than just about everybody else in this country” since he has more resources at his disposal to maneuver his legal issues. Schultz initially said he wasn’t being treated differently because everyone has the same legal rights, but conceded that “if you’re talking about resources, yes, the average person can’t take a case beginning to end through the United States Supreme Court. Donald Trump does, right? And he can avail himself of that, of those rights.”

Watch the video above via CNN.