Just came to the comments to say the same lol I love that aside from it being a checker piece, he’s somehow already down to just one even though smith only moved one pawn one space lol
“advice of counsel” is a tough defense to assert. It comes with some preconditions that could prove highly damaging to Trump as well as legal hurdles that the jury could quickly find render the defense unavailable to him.
one thing that disappears right away is your right to assert that your communications with those lawyers are “privileged.”
Skipping a bunch of the other items why it’s tough and going for the trap:
flipping attorneys is problematic, normally, because even if they agree to squawk, prosecutors normally can’t put them on a stand and ask them to testify about communications with their client. That’s because the attorney-client privilege belongs to the client. It isn’t something attorneys by themselves can decide to waive.
But here, again by putting advice of counsel at issue, Trump himself has waived the privilege.
In short, Jack Smith appears to have leveraged the advice of counsel defense by naming a bunch of lawyer co-conspirators. This could permit him to crack open the black box of the conspiracies, should any co-conspirator cooperate.
I assumed it was AI generated based on a prompt, but my apologies if I'm maligning anyone's art by saying that. It's a fantastic bit of art no matter how it was made IMO.
Ron Perlman in his role as the narrator of the majority of the Fallout series is the default narrator for me. I've heard a lot of people also have Ron Howard as the Arrested Development narrator as their default internal narrator
It’s completely possible for Trump to lose this case and have it thrown out or negated. This is a real and vital test for the rule of law. I am not confident the grand experiment in law and liberty will survive.
I hate the terminology of ‘prosecutor set a trap’ or ‘perjury trap’ if you remember when Mueller wanted to get Trump to testify under oath. It might be a trap in the sense of catching someone, but it gives off this sense of plotting and scheming to unjustly nab an unknowing innocent being that was just going about its business, like when you trap a rabbit or something.
It’s not a trap. Trump doesn’t have a good defense because he did do the thing he is accused of. A horseback cavalry charge against a machine gun isn’t “a clever trap by the machine gunner” one side just has the tools to win, and the other side doesn’t.
Yeah, it’s much more like a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” thing than a trap. Or a “backed yourself in to a corner” you might say, or, “completely fucked yourself and the prosecutor knows it and is going to use it”. But it’s only setting a trap in the sense that any airtight prosecution tactic based on rules and evidence that leaves the defendant no way out could be called a ‘trap’
I’d put just a bit more distance in there. Trap, to me, implies bait or deception being used to lure something or someone into a place or situation of your design.
Jack Smith did not design the situation that the defense team placed themselves in. I am reasonable sure he’s overjoyed that they did.
The OP article does make a good case for exactly how that defense will fail in multiple ways, from a legal standpoint.
I was in civil court before and almost fucked up by submitting previous emails from a former lawyer of mine. Glad my attorney caught it and mentioned the shitstorm it would start.
What I don’t understand is how someone who has been dealing with lawsuits his whole life could be so stupid?
It is actually easier to manipulate people if you’re ignorant and over-confident. It is much easier because you don’t have to lie and adapt your speech, you just do you.
Eh, he’s not exactly hiring the best lawyers. In any other situation the best law firms would be jumping at the chance to defend a former president, but due to past behaviour (not paying, not following advice, committing additional crimes, asking lawyers to commit crimes for him), he’s only hiring rubes and crazies.
His lawyers have been dealing with lawsuits his whole life.
It’s the same with his businesses- the ones that are successful are successful in spite of him, because somehow he got someone competent to work under him.
But he really is an idiot, and totally incompetent at everything he touches. Except maybe reality tv, because people just eat up shitty assholes there
Absolute truth here. From the moment he got into office, it seems like "loudest asshole in the room" has become a persona every Republican has embraced.
The crazies have not been getting less crazy, and they're doing their best to convert as many fence-sitters as possible.
But its not just about who wins and who loses the presidential election. There's also down-ticket races, as well as the increased extremism that this ongoing spectacle is pushing on all parts of the political spectrum.
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