MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan Argues It’s Time for Trump to be Charged: Other Nations’ Former Leaders Are ‘Prosecuted and Imprisoned All the Time’

No former U.S. president has ever been charged with a criminal offense, but that’s not the norm around the world, said MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan on Sunday, arguing that it was time for former President Donald Trump to be prosecuted.

The American presidency is one of the “most exclusive clubs in the world,” said Hasan at the top of the hour, adding that as a Marvel fan, he was “always tickled by how Saturday Night Live used to portray the ‘Ex-Presidents’ as actual cartoon superheroes.”

Hasan, who was born in England to Indian immigrant parents and became a U.S. citizen in October 2020, noted that “as a relatively new citizen to this country, one thing that is uniquely American about it is that no former president of the United States has ever been charged with a criminal offense.”

“While that may seem normal to you,” he continued, “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.”

Hasan listed several examples, including former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was “getting ready to launch a run for his old job, even as his corruption trial is underway,” and former French President Nicholas Sarkozy who had his home raided, after he left office in a campaign finance investigation that led to two convictions,” which he was appealing in an effort to stay out of prison.

Peru has “prosecuted every president since 1985,” Hasan pointed out. “Imagine if every president since Ronald Reagan has faced trial in the U.S.” he added with a bit of a chuckle.

“The rest of the world is probably wondering why [Trump] hasn’t been prosecuted yet, why we are a weird global outlier when it comes to giving former leaders some kind of a blanket immunity from prosecution,” said Hasan.

After playing several clips from Trump’s recent rally, Hasan introduced his panel of The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer, who had a column this week arguing that if Trump were anyone else he would have already been prosecuted, NYU law professor and MSNBC legal analyst Melissa Murray, and MSNBC columnist and host of The Dean Obeidallah Show on SiriusXM, Dean Obeidallah.

“Adam, you write in your recent piece in The Atlantic that for Trump defenders, the law is meant to be enforced only against certain categories of people among whom Trump is not included,” said Hasan. “And you are right, of course. It’s a great line. But it’s not just Trump defenders, is it? America as a whole hasn’t done what other Republican or liberal democracies have done, and prosecute a president ever?”

The U.S. had indeed not done that, Serwer concurred, and there was “one reason why…America’s ex-presidents have tended not to commit brazen crimes out of office.”

The national security issues implicated in Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified information was an “apolitical” issue, Serwer argued, and “not a highly ideological or political issue,” and therefore what Trump did was “put himself in a situation” where the FBI and Justice Department thought that they had to do something “urgently, in order to protect classified information.”

Hasan asked Murray, the law professor, how “big of a legal undertaking is it to indict and then successfully prosecute a former president of the United States?”

It would be a “significant undertaking,” she replied, simply because it was indeed “unprecedented” and something that we had “never” done. Also, Trump was not just a former president but “also someone who may be in the future a presidential candidate.”

Those facts made it more complicated, she acknowledged, but also “even more urgent.”

“The idea that someone is above the law, simply because they have sat at the helm of this country, or may sit at the helm of this country in the future, is actually untenable to the idea that no man is above the law,” said Murray.

“When you listen to Trump speaking yesterday at a rally in Pennsylvania, it’s a reminder of how abnormal a politician he is, how deranged the stuff he says is, and how we’ve just become numb to it. It’s almost normalized. But we can’t allow it to be normalized, can we?” Hasan asked Obeidallah.

Obeidallah agreed and then joked to Hasan that he had “picked a perfect time to become a U.S. citizen, just as our democracy is ending. I’m glad that you’re here so we can all join hands together.”

The SiriusXM host said that he “would love to ignore Donald Trump” but couldn’t, citing how the ex-president had “demonized” law enforcement, prosecutors, and courts in a way that incited a “batch” of “threats of violence” against the FBI and the judge who had signed the Mar-a-Lago search warrant.

Trump had tried to “wage a coup” and had “classified documents strewn around his golf club in between the tennis course and the pool,” said Obeidallah. “Are you kidding me? In any other nation, he is prosecuted — if the rule of law means something, he’s gotta be prosecuted.”

“You’re prosecuted for much less in other nations,” replied Hasan.

Watch above via MSNBC.