At least one of Donald Trump’s former lawyers appears to have a pretty low opinion of the newest defence that the ex-president’s legal team is trying out for size.
Ty Cobb, former White House counsel, was speaking on CNN when he was asked about a whirlwind Sunday morning media tour embarked upon by John Lauro, one of Mr Trump’s currently defence attorneys.
On several shows across the major TV networks, Mr Lauro displayed the Trump camp’s newest excuse for the former president’s efforts to pressure various Republican officials to interfere with state or federal election processes on his behalf, including his vice president, Mike Pence.
In multiple interviews, Mr Lauro used the same word — “aspirational” — to describe Mr Trump’s urgings for Mr Pence to attempt to halt the Senate’s process certifying the 2020 election that he did to describe a phone call in which the former president was heard urging Georgia officials to “find” thousands of votes for him that did not exist.
Mr Cobb was asked by CNN’s Erin Burnett whether there was any First Amendment defence that would come into play when a politician or elected official requests that a subordinate violate the law.
“Not at all. I’m not aware of the ‘aspirational’ defence or the free speech defence to a gang leader saying to two of his subordinates, ‘I need you two to please rob a bank for me,’ and they do it. That’s aspirational but it leads to a crime and that’s exactly what Trump did with Pence,” Mr Cobb responded.
His analysis appeared to poke a hole cleanly through the argument that the Trump team has made all weekend — that merely encouraging a crime to be committed is not an offence. Mr Trump has pleaded not guilty to all of the 78 criminal charges that the former president is accused of, including the four related to the 2020 election. But the “aspirational” defence appears to be the closest the Trump team has come to acknowledging that the actions the president requested, if carried out, would have been blatantly illegal.
DoJ special counsel Jack Smith has argued that Mr Trump conspired to violate the constitutional rights of millions of Americans when he worked to change the results of the 2020 election even after losing all of his court challenges and being told, repeatedly, by his own expert authorities that his claims of election fraud were false.
The ex-president is separately charged in two other cases involving classified documents retained from the White House as well as his own hush payments to a porn star in 2016. Despite his professed innocence, his lawyers have said that they expect more charges related to the 2020 election to be handed down in Georgia.
His latest criminal indictment has been understood by numerous experts to have been engineered by the Justice Department for speed in the hopes that it will play out, one way or another, before the 2024 presidential election concludes. Mr Trump remains the dominant candidate in the Republican presidential primary.
