Still scrambling
Huh. It turns out there are drawbacks to basing your defense on an obvious lie. What drawbacks are those? The lawyers who refuse to take your case.
With mere hours left before a deadline for Donald Trump to officially answer the impeachment charge against him, the former president was still scrambling to assemble a legal defense, announcing that he had hired two new lawyers after a five-person team abruptly quit their roles.
Trump has until noon on Tuesday to reply to a charge of incitement of insurrection, for encouraging the assault on the US Capitol on 6 January in which five people died. His trial in the Senate is scheduled to begin on 9 February.
Let’s pause for a second to remind ourselves that he got those five people killed, along with the two cops who committed suicide afterwards. The rest of us would feel pretty consumed with horror if we had gotten seven people killed by doing a criminal thing to further our own self-interest. I’m betting Trump hasn’t wasted a second on the thought.
The unveiling of Trump’s new legal pairing – one a Fox News commentator and former counsel to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, the other a former county prosecutor who opposed charging Bill Cosby with sexual assault – fueled concerns the provisional return to normalcy since Joe Biden’s inauguration is about to be upended.
I don’t think two worthless lawyers who work for Trump are going to be able to upend much. I’m a lot more worried about Greene and Boebert than about Trump’s mobster lawyers.
The trial could be particularly dangerous, legal scholars said, if Trump builds his case around his lie that the November election was stolen and Senate Republicans effectively endorse that lie, in unprecedented numbers, by voting to acquit.
Multiple reports suggested Trump jettisoned his previous legal team because they were unwilling to recite the election fraud lie. Trump’s new lawyers, David Schoen and Bruce Castor, did not indicate what defense they had planned.
Well they’ve barely had time to comb their hair, let alone plan a defense.
Schoen is an eager media presence whose past clients include Roger Stone, convicted for lying to Congress in the Russia investigation but pardoned by Trump. The attorney also told the Discovery channel Epstein had asked him to take over the defense of his case before the convicted sex trafficker killed himself in prison in August 2019.
“I don’t believe he took his own life,” Schoen said, demonstrating an ease with the conspiratorial thinking that has fed Trump’s election lies and taken over the Republican base.
In other words he’s an absurd hack. Who else would take Trump’s case?
It’s all for show anyway; the Republicans are determined to let him off.
“The ‘crisis’ over Trump’s legal team quitting assumes that the substance of the impeachment case will sway Senate Republicans,” the Princeton University historian Julian Zelizer tweeted. “Most already have their answer. Trump could offer no defense or he can go on the floor to read lines from the Joker movie – they would still vote to acquit.”
On the other hand it seems the lawyers have to be somewhat careful.
Any lawyer who repeats Trump’s fraud claim before Congress would risk legal sanction, analysts said, noting that in the midst of Trump’s attempts to get ballots thrown out, not even the former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani would make certain claims about election fraud before an actual judge.
Interesting.
I’d be willing to take on Trump’s defense, as long as he pays in advance. Of course I’m unqualified, incompetent, and lazy, and would do a terrible job, but surely Trump could relate.
A lawyer friend posted (publicly) an image saying there are three main reasons lawyers quit cases:
1. The client won’t take their advice.
2. The client instructed the lawyer to do something which would compromise their professional duty, such as lying in court.
3. The client won’t pay.
He said, “I suspect we’ve got the holy trinity here.”
Can Trump defend himself? The accused can do that in ordinary criminal trials, as I understand. If he’s going to be acquitted anyway, why bother with a legal team at all?
(Personally I’d have gone for “hit the trifecta” rather than “got the holy trinity”, but he’s a religious guy, so understandable.)
Sackbut, it might also be a hat trick.
There is a lot of speculation that his last legal team quit because Trump insists on using his claims of a rigged election as his defence. Now, I can normally make pretty accurate guesses of what people are thinking when they make bad decisions, but Trump has me beat hands down (possibly because ‘thinking’ is too grand a word for whatever passes as the thought process in his head). I mean, what idiot would ever think that a good defence against charges of inciting insurrection would be ‘Yes, I did it, but only because I believed the election was stolen from me’? Especially when said idiot knows that his claim is a lie, and knows that everybody else with an IQ larger than their shoe size knows it’s a lie even if some of them choose to pretend to believe it.
AoS, there is speculation from some that he actually believes he won, and that the election was “rigged”, which might say something more odious about his actual mental state. He really is out of touch with reality on a lot of levels apparently, which is harder to witness now that he’s lost his twitter bullhorn, but it can’t have disappeared with his @. He’s not only obviously stupid, but now obviously deluded as well. I’m not sure we could make that assessment 5 years ago, he was a stupid asshole yes, but (arguably) marginally sane.
I hope the fucker melts in the Florida sun.
Throw some water on him. He’s the Crooked Wretch of the East, he’ll melt immediately.
Oh that’s an excellent name for him!
AoS,
Trump knows that the Senate isn’t going to convict him no matter what defense he mounts. He can ignore the trial entirely, or hire competent counsel and heed their advice, or show up personally and moon Chuck Schumer and call the GOP Senators “my obedient little bitches, especially Ted Cruz who has an ugly wife,” and the outcome will be the same.
So Trump’s goal isn’t to mount a “good defense,” or even any defense at all, except in the sense of “the best defense is a good offense.” What he really wants to do is indulge his own emotional needs and put on a good show for his supporters. Ranting about how the election was stolen from him, how Sleepy Joe Biden is a Chinese Communist tool who also take bribes from the Ukraine, and the Mueller investigation was all a hoax, and COVID is a Democratic plot funded by George Soros, and Rachel Maddow kicks puppies, and I’m-not-saying-QAnon-is-all-true-but-I’m-not-saying-it-isn’t-if-you-catch-my-drift…. it all helps rile up his base, remind GOP officeholders that he still owns the party, and that all sets him up to keep the grift operation running.
Trump isn’t going to measure success in this trial by whether or not 34 GOP Senators vote to acquit him or 50 do; he’s going to measure it by the TV ratings and the amount of donations that come in.
I’m sure he believes that. He doesn’t have any concept of the difference between truth and falsehood, as long as (he thinks) something is advantageous to him.
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