MSNBC’s Ari Melber Lays Out Trump’s ‘Sprawling Web of Criminality’ With Ex-President As the ‘Ringleader’

During Tuesday’s episode of MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber, the host took almost 20 minutes to lay out just how many associates of former President Donald Trump have been found guilty of crimes, putting on display a “sprawling web of criminality” across Trump’s campaigns and businesses.

Ari Melber’s segment itself was sprawling and based on what was on the legal record. Beginning with figures from Trump’s 2016 campaign — Paul Manafort, Roger Stone, Michael Flynn — Melber points out how deep the criminality goes when it comes to Trump’s operations, referring to the ex-president as the “ringleader” of all of it:

So after years where people did fairly note that Trump himself had not been convicted and was legally presumed innocent in any open cases, we are now in this new terrain, and there’s been so much “criming” and so much misconduct, it would be easy to lose sight of that wider and important context. The legal system has determined this isn’t a case where an employer showed bad judgment, or happened to work in an industry rife with criminals. I can say in all seriousness, you could imagine being a casino CEO in the ’60s and having employees convicted of crimes, and yet the CEO didn’t know about them, didn’t commit them. Here’s the difference now — the courts have determined this is not like that.

And this was before the 2020 election. Way before Trump himself was found guilty of falsifying business records ahead of the 2016 election. Melber drives the point home with figures who have been convicted for crimes related to his second campaign, such as Steve Bannon, Peter Navarro, Jenna Ellis, Kenneth Cheseboro, and Sidney Powell, just to name a few:

So together, you see this as a criminal set of enterprises, with Donald Trump convicted at the top. Trump’s role atop these three organizations that are rife with convictions over the last seven years is revealing. It adds a legal finding to what was honestly once a more circumstantial take. People would say, well, he benefited from these other crimes, sure. And he’s got these types of people around him, and he seemed involved. And yeah, you somehow linked. That’s what we used to hear. And some of that might have sounded like overly friendly spin, some of it might sound like what you’re supposed to say, particularly you work in fields that involve fact checking, law or journalism, or you can’t just say because something looks like it’s going one direction, it’s confirmed. And legally, it was not confirmed. It means something when we say “presumed innocent” because it hasn’t been legally tried. And it means something quite different when you say, as you see atop the chart, the person atop these three organizations that had so many crimes and convictions already that he is now convicted. So the line goes up and down these crime sprees.

Watch the videos above via MSNBC.

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