Trump ‘Almost Certainly’ Going To Jail If Case Goes To Trial

Former New Jersey Governor and Republican presidential candidate Chris Christie says it would be a “roll of the dice” for former President Donald Trump to take his classified documents case to trial. “When you know you’re guilty—and my suspicion is Donald Trump knows he’s guilty—you go and you take a case to trial, there will then be a presumption of jail time.”

Christie, a former federal prosecutor, said should Trump force the government to make its case against him in court, it’s “almost certain” he would go to jail if he’s convicted.

“The way most U.S. attorney’s offices handle that is, if you plead, we can work with you in terms of whether you have to go to jail or not on some of the charges that he’s talking about here,” Christie told CNN’s Jake Tapper Thursday. “If you make the case go to trial, if you force us to go and put the witnesses on stand and the judge to take the time and the jury to take the time, and you’re prosecuted and convicted, then it’s almost certain that you would face jail.”

Christie told Tapper he believes the closer the case gets to trial, the more likely it will be that Trump—and his indicted personal aide Walt Nauta—will decide to take the safer route and plead. “I found that jurors that I ran into for seven years as U.S. attorney,” Christie said, were very unlikely to make decisions based on their personal political views. “I never saw one of them make what I thought was a political judgment.”

For his part, Trump continues to insist that the case is political, calling it “massive prosecutorial misconduct” in a message posted Thursday to his Truth Social platform, where he also asked supporters “do the people of this once great nation even have a choice but to protest the potential doom in the United States of America??? 2024!!!”