With a Fool for a Client, Trump Gives Himself a Crackpot Defense
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If any attorney were as smart as Trump, they’d be president instead of peddling their services for chump change, one billable hour at a time.
When Donald Trump filed the first brief in his second impeachment trial late Tuesday, he did the one thing he shouldn’t: tell his big election lie—only bigger and more dangerous because he and his lawyers are now swearing to it.
The spirit of Trump suffused the assertions—he won, dammit, and the Senate is going to get an earful about it—couched in legalese and double negatives. The brief denied Trump sought to subvert the election results, which in any event he had the right to “suspect” weren’t valid. Whatever he said, including his speech to the patriots from the lawn behind the White House, is protected speech under the First Amendment and didn’t incite anybody anyway. Then comes a royal head-spinner: “Insufficient evidence exists upon which a reasonable jurist could conclude that the 45th president’s statements were accurate or not, and he therefore denies they were false.” Sit down and then parse: Trump “denies” it is false to say he won “in a landslide.”
That’s circumlocutious, at best, to use a word a lawyer would charge $100 for. Trump is one headstrong client and the fool is effectively running his own defense. If the brief reads a little rough, it’s because for a period over the weekend, Trump had no lawyers at all. It’s hard to keep counsel on board when the client is determined to argue a case that’s already been repeatedly and resoundingly lost. Enter Bruce Castor, best known for refusing to prosecute Bill Cosby, and David Schoen, whose client list includes dirty trickster Roger Stone and various mobsters and almost Jeffrey Epstein, who he publicly argued couldn’t have committed suicide because he’d been so upbeat when they met in his cell.
