NBC Legal Analyst Condemns Message by Trump Lawyer on FBI Raid About ‘Civil Unrest’: That’s a ‘Veiled Threat’
Donald Trump and his lawyers sent a “veiled threat” to Attorney General Merrick Garland, NBC legal analyst Barbara McQuade argued on Tuesday.
In an appearance on MSNBC, McQuade, also a professor at the University of Michigan Law School, reacted to a court filing by Trump’s legal team in response to the FBI’s raid of the former president’s Mar-a-Lago property. In the filing, which requests a third party to review collected evidence, Trump’s team recounts a message sent to a Department of Justice official earlier in the month.
MSNBC host Jose Diaz-Balart read from the filing:
President Trump wants the attorney general to know he has been hearing from people all over the country about the raid. If there was one word to describe their mood, it is “angry.” The heat is building up. The pressure is building up. Whatever I can do to take the heat down, to bring the pressure down, just let us know.
Asked how she would take such a message if she were working in the Department of Justice, McQuade labeled the language a “veiled threat” against Garland.
“I would see it as a veiled threat that they’re suggesting that if you take action against me, there could be civil unrest. And boy, once we start negotiating with terrorists, we’re in deep trouble. So that would strike me as a very improper statement,” she said. “It is not, ‘I want to resolve this, I want to help,’ it is, ‘beware, there are people out there who may engage in violence if you act against me, so I think it’s incredibly inappropriate.”
New York Times correspondent and CNN analyst Maggie Haberman had similar comments about the Trump team’s message to Garland, calling Trump’s language about “angry” supporters an “implicit threat” on Monday’s Anderson Cooper 360.
McQuade added to her thoughts on Tuesday that she believed the message is some kind of secret “warning” to Garland about going to “war” with Trump, the hidden message being: “If you go to war with me, I’ve got an army that’s going to rise up, so just beware what you’re doing.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
