The Trump legal team is struggling. If you didn’t watch Lawrence O’Donnell last night, do watch this bit now:
O’Donnell says this corroborates a portion of the new indictments; see paragraph 93. During a meeting on January 4, 2021, the indictment said, Trump directed Vice President Pence to either reject the ballots from the seven “targeted” states outright or send the ballots back to the seven states to have the state legislatures decide the outcome. Pence objected, as you know. This is a key part of the attempt to defraud the United States. And then in a television interview last night, Trump lawyer John Lauro told pretty much the same story:
“President Trump wanted to get to the truth. He desperately wanted to get to what happened in the 2020 cycle,” Trump’s attorney John Lauro said on Newsmax on Thursday evening. So, he said, “at the end he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting” — that is, counting the submitted electors on Jan. 6, 2021 — “for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in and then they could make a determination to audit or reaudit or recertify.”
But Philip Bump points out in WaPo that Trump had already publicly admitted this in a tweet on the morning of January 6.
States want to correct their votes, which they now know were based on irregularities and fraud, plus corrupt process never received legislative approval. All Mike Pence has to do is send them back to the States, AND WE WIN. Do it Mike, this is a time for extreme courage!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2021
Plus, Trump said this in his rally speech:
“The Republicans have to get tougher. You’re not going to have a Republican Party if you don’t get tougher,” Trump said at one point, clearly referring at least in part to Pence. “They want to play so straight. They want to play so, sir, yes, the United States. The Constitution doesn’t allow me to send them back to the States.”
“Well, I say, yes it does, because the Constitution says you have to protect our country and you have to protect our Constitution, and you can’t vote on fraud,” he continued. “And fraud breaks up everything, doesn’t it? When you catch somebody in a fraud, you’re allowed to go by very different rules. So I hope Mike has the courage to do what he has to do.”
Per the new indictments, there was no evidence that the election result for Joe Biden in the “targeted” states was inaccurate, and Trump knew that. Hence, fraud. What had O’Donnell gobsmacked was that Trump’s own lawyer readily admitted at least part of the fraud.
But this suggests to me that Trump’s legal team has decided it’s pointless to deny that Trump asked Pence to mess with ballots. They’re probably going to pretend Trump genuinely believed there was fraud. Zachary Beau at Axios writes,
Former President Trump’s legal team is teasing a risky defense to his historic third indictment: that Trump genuinely believed his own lies about election fraud — despite being told by dozens of his closest advisers, allies and agencies that they were baseless.
Why it matters: If they proceed to trial, Trump’s lawyers effectively could be asking a jury to believe that the former president was delusional — undermining special counsel Jack Smith’s core thesis that Trump “knowingly” sought to defraud the country.
What else have they got? I assume the Trump lawyers anticipated Trump would be charged with inciting the January 6 violence, but Jack Smith chose not to go there. So all their blathering about “free speech” is irrelevant.
But what will Trump say about this? Is Mr. Stable Genius going to allow his lawyers to claim he was too deluded to understand what people were telling him? I don’t think so. He’s going to want the trial to be about how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
Oh, I so hope the trial is televised.