Former White House Counsel John Dean who has cashed in for decades off his Watergate-era fame relished the idea that former President Donald J. Trump would be booked in the notorious Fulton County jail when he surrenders to authorities next week.
Dean, now a CNN analyst, appeared on Friday’s edition of “CNN Tonight” where he discussed the 2024 GOP frontrunner’s indictment by Fulton DA Fani Willis and Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat’s pledge that he’ll subject the former POTUS to a trophy mugshot for the press.
The 84-year-old former Nixon aide suggested that the squalor at the “hellhole” jail could induce some of the 18 co-defendants in Willis’ racketeering case to cut a deal with prosecutors, something that Dean, whose squealing was instrumental in the taking down of President Richard M. Nixon back in the 1970s knows a thing or two about.
(Video: CNN)
“And we’ve seen Trump motorcade in and out of his previous court appearances, John. I mean, do you think that this surrender could hit Trump a little differently than the ones that came before?” Acosta asked. “And that — this is — I mean, somebody who is kind of the master of the spectacle, I don’t think this is the spectacle that he really wants to see or be a part of.”
“No. The jail he’s going to surrender at is a hellhole,” replied the Watergate ghoul. “It has been — it has received a lot of negative and national attention. I think any of the defendants in this newly-charged case who get a whiff of that place may think twice about whether they want to stand trial or try to work out a deal.”
(Video: Fox5 Atlanta)
“I don’t think Trump will do that. He’s always the double-down guy. But, you know, I hope they do treat him like any other person and don’t give him special treatment. But he does have a Secret Service detail that has to protect him. So that will make some exception,” he added.
“Yeah, it’s going to be a wild scene,” Acosta said. “I mean, Mark, let me just go to you. If 18 people get mugshots and Trump does not, if he somehow manages to not get a mugshot next week, although — I mean, from what the sheriff is indicating, it sounds like this is going to happen. But if he doesn’t, how is that going to play?”
“Well, I think if the other 18 are, then he’s likely to,” answered panelist and former Bush-McCain adviser Mark McKinnon. “What we’re seeing from this judge increasingly is that she doesn’t intend to treat him any differently than the rest of the defendants.”
“The thing that’s unprecedented and fascinating about next week is that on the one hand, we’re going to have a national Republican debate where Trump will not be on stage, and yet just the following day, he will be in a federal courthouse where we may see a mugshot,” added McKinnon, “So, we may see a mugshot of Donald Trump, but we won’t see his face on the national stage in the debate, which is an interesting diametrically opposed visual that we’re not used to seeing with Donald Trump.”
Like fellow Watergate fossils Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, Dean has been a fixture on cable news during the entirety of the corrupt establishment’s operation to take down Trump, with constant comparisons to the nearly 50-year-old scandal that chased Nixon from the White House less than two years after he was reelected by voters in what was at the time, the greatest electoral margin in the nation’s history.
Fired by Nixon, the former White House lawyer squealed like a rat and the rest is history.
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