Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) emphasized the gravity of former President Donald Trump’s criminal hush money trial, stating that he expects Americans to pay close attention to court proceedings, which could influence their vote.
Raskin’s remarks came after Trump’s attorneys minimized the trial. Attorney Will Scharf stated on Sunday that it is essentially a “six-week-long media extravaganza.”
The lawmaker described it as a “very serious case,” linking it to other criminal charges involving Trump’s attempts to alter the 2020 election.
“Trump’s people would like to trivialize and diminish the significance of this trial, but it is perfectly emblematic of the others that are out there,” Raskin said in an MSNBC interview with Jenn Psaki on Sunday.
“They are all about electoral intervention and manipulation.” And we’ll see that in the DC case,” he added. “They tried it through deception. We’ll see that in the Georgia case. And here they tried it with payoffs and then falsified the books. Financial manipulation. That’s all it’s about.”
“I think the Trump people are going to be shocked at how tuned-in America is to what’s going on here,” he said.
Trump’s criminal hush money trial will begin jury selection on Monday in Manhattan, where prosecutors claim the former president illegally concealed payments made to conceal an earlier alleged affair during the final days of the 2016 presidential campaign.
The trial is slated to take six weeks and is the first of four criminal proceedings filed against the former president.
