Trump’s Lawyer Basically Admits Trump Really Did One of the Things He’s Charged With (Video)
Donald Trump has apparently had real problems hiring lawyers to represent him in the criminal indictments he’s accumulated over the last several months, though he has always managed to find one by his arraignment dates.
And in his latest indictment — stemming from the investigation into the disgraced ex-president’s role in the Jan. 6 attack — Trump is represented in part by John Lauro. Lauro, as it turns out, has an interesting strategy for defending his client: Admit he basically did what he’s accused of.
Lauro was a guest on Greg Kelly’s Newsmax show in order to discuss Trump’s arraignment earlier Thursday, where he said this:
“President Trump wanted to get to the truth. He desperately wanted to get to what happened during the 2020 cycle. He did it in the courtroom. He did it in lobbying legislatures, that’s all First Amendment. And then at the end, he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit, or re-audit, or recertify. But what he didn’t do is, you know, send in the tanks, tell Mike Pence don’t go to Capitol Hill, or do anything that would obstruct the due process of government,” Lauro said.
He was simply petitioning the government the same way the same way we have those rights with with his complaints, and redresses and objections to the election cycle. He’s entitled to do that. If we criminalize that speech. I fear what’s going to happen in the next election cycle was perhaps a new administration is gonna come in, and there’s gonna be a lot, of a lot of talk about identifying Democrats who have constructed the 2024 cycle,” he concluded.
Watch it here:
Now to be clear, Lauro has greatly misrepresented what Trump is charged with.
Trump is bring prosecuted under ;aws originally drafted to stop the Ku Klux Klan from using violence and intimidation to stop Black people from voting. They have of course since been applied to myriad other times when people deployed similar tactics.
He’s is charged with four counts: Conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction; and conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.
You can read the whole indictment here, but the long story short of it is Trump and his accomplices conspired to use deception and intimidation to derail certification of the election by multiple means, culminating in Trump inciting the Jan. 6 attack.
By Lauro’s admission, Trump tried to persuade then-Vice President Mike Pence to violate the constitution by delaying the certification of votes. Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence is cited in the indictment as evidence against him. Which of course makes this a very interesting defense strategy.
One thing we should note is that, as Special Counsel Jack Smith explained at length in the indictment, Trump is not being charged for any reason related to the First Amendment. His right to lie, his right to believe or not believe that he won in 2020, none of this is in question. And to be clear, Trump’s guilt or innocence in the charges he faces will not depend in any way on proving whether or not he actually believes he won the 2020 election.
What Trump said is only relevant as it pertains to what he was trying to do. It’s not a direct comparison, obviously, but conceptually it’s similar to charging Charles Manson for his role in the murders committed by his followers on his orders.
Simply put, as Vox put it, “there is no First Amendment right to overturn an election.“
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