Analysis: Trump and team want to discredit US election subversion trial

Donald Trump and his legal team are stepping up efforts to discredit and delay a trial over his alleged bid to overturn the 2020 election, as his fight to avoid criminal convictions becomes increasingly indistinguishable from his presidential campaign.

Last Sunday (6), the ex-president’s lawyer promised to file a petition to move the trial from Washington DC, claiming that a local jury will not reflect the “characteristics” of the American people. As prosecutors seek a speedy trial, he warned that his team will try to take the case for years, in an apparent attempt to drag it out until after the 2024 election.

Trump has demanded that the judge assigned to hear the case recuse himself in a barrage of attacks on the process that may legally fail, but will put into his campaign narrative that he is the victim of political persecution by the Biden administration aimed at preventing Trump from a return to the House. White.

Trump pleaded not guilty when he was indicted in Washington last week – his third plea in a criminal case in the past four months. But his new efforts to tarnish an eventual trial in this case reflect his long-term strategy of trying to delegitimize any institution — including the courts, the Department of Justice, US intelligence agencies and the press — that contradicts his narrative or challenges his power.

Those efforts unraveled as the precarious nature of his position after his third indictment began to sink in and the ramifications for the 2024 election widened.

Mike Pence, speaking at the CNN this weekend, he didn’t rule out testifying at a Trump trial if he has to, which would be a stunning potential scenario for a vice president to provide evidence against his former running mate.

Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, for his part, has rejected one of the arguments the former president and his allies have resorted to – that he was simply exercising his right to free speech by trying to overturn the election result in 2020. Barr, who said Trump had no evidence of widespread voter fraud during his final weeks in office, also said Sunday that “it’s clear” he would appear as a witness at the trial if asked.

Trump’s status as the frontrunner for the Republican presidential nomination has left his rivals with a painful political tightrope walk as they try to take advantage of their situation while avoiding alienating GOP primary voters. But several candidates hardened their criticism of the former president over the issue this weekend as the campaign heats up.

Pence said in CNN that in the tense days leading up to Congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s election, Trump urged him to put loyalty to him above his oath to the Constitution and halt the process. “I’m running for president in part because I think anyone who puts himself above the Constitution should never be president of the United States,” Pence said.

And Florida Governor Ron DeSantis went a step further in his criticism of Trump, while still arguing that the Biden administration is merging justice against the former president. While campaigning in Iowa on Friday, DeSantis — who is struggling to preserve his wobbly status as the No. 2 Republican in primary polls — said Trump’s false allegations of voter fraud were “baseless.”

In a subsequent interview with NBC, DeSantis added, “Whoever puts their hand on the Bible on January 20th every four years is the winner.”

“Of course, he lost,” DeSantis said. “Joe Biden is the president”. Florida’s governor also, however, berated people in the media and elsewhere for acting like “this was the perfect election”.

The rapid developments since Trump’s indictment last week provide a preview of one of the most monumental criminal trials in American political history. They also hint at this case, and two others in which Trump has pleaded not guilty – that of mishandling confidential documents and that of charges stemming from a clandestine payment to an adult film actress – are sure to deepen a corrosive national political divide.

Trump Criticizes Prosecutors, Judge, Biden Administration, GOP Senators

Defense teams are entitled to use all court mechanisms within legal limits to the best advantage of their clients. Attempts to delay trials with pretrial litigation are not uncommon, and prosecutors and defense attorneys often disagree on questions of procedure and evidence.

But Trump’s case is unique, given the defendant’s visibility, the fact that he is a former president running for another term in the White House and that he is using his power and fame to mount a corrosive campaign outside the courtroom to drain public confidence. public in the justice system. It is becoming increasingly clear that there is no distinction between your legal strategy and your political strategy in an election that is now consumed by its criminal indictment and the possibility of convictions.

In posts on his Truth Social network that highlighted a furious mood, Trump on Sunday demanded the dismissal of Judge Tanya Chutkan, the Obama-appointed presiding judge, and a change of venue outside the capital. He criticized Special Counsel Jack Smith as “crazed” and claimed the US was being “destroyed”. On Saturday night, in a speech in South Carolina, Trump demanded that Senate Republicans do more to protect him.

His threatening rhetoric is already having a direct impact on pre-trial preparations, as both parties anticipate a judge’s decision on the trial date.

Smith’s prosecutors asked the court on Friday to place strict limits on how Trump can release evidence that will be turned over as part of the lawsuit. Trump’s team sought an extension of the Monday afternoon deadline to file the matter, but Chutkan declined the request.

Prosecutors want the judge to impose a protective order limiting how Trump could use such evidence because of his past public statements about witnesses, judges, lawyers and others. In their filing, they included a screenshot of a Truth Social post in which Trump warned, “IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I WILL GO AFTER YOU!”

Trump’s lawyer, John Lauro, argued in the CNN on Sunday that the special counsel was trying to withhold evidence from the press and the American people about the case that “may speak to President Trump’s innocence.”

Barr dismisses Trump’s theory of the affair

Trump is trying to delay and prolong the trial so the country doesn’t have a final answer about his alleged guilt until after the election. If Trump wins the White House in November 2024, he will again have access to executive powers and status that could freeze federal prosecutions against him or mitigate any guilty verdicts.

Lauro said on CBS News Sunday that he was not aware of any similar cases brought to trial two or three years after the indictment. He has also said in other talk show appearances that he planned to recast the 2020 election as a way to challenge Smith’s accusations. Trump, however, has made several attempts to overturn the 2020 result in court, and judges have repeatedly dismissed his allegations of voter fraud as without merit.

Lauro also revealed his defense strategy, arguing that despite being told several times by campaign officials and aides that he lost the election, Trump’s actions were not criminal as he was convinced he had won.

“The defense is quite simple. donald trump […] I believed in my heart that I had won that election,” he said. “And like any American citizen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amendment. He had the right to petition governments across the country, state governments, based on his complaints that election irregularities had occurred.”

But Barr, a conservative Republican who was a staunch Trump supporter until the end of his administration, said that while Smith’s case was certainly “challenging,” he didn’t think it “violates the First Amendment.”

Trump’s forward-looking defense raises the possibility that any future politician could create an alternate reality unrelated to the facts of an election outcome and then take steps designed to retain power.

Barr sought to clear up what he said was confusion about the case. “This involved a situation where the states had already made the official, authoritative determination of who won in those states and sent the votes and certified them to Congress,” Barr said.

“Essentially, the government’s claim is that, at that moment, the president conspired, made a plan, a scheme that involved a lot of falsehood, whose objective was to erase those votes, annul those legal votes.”

Another assertion by the Trump team that is being amplified in the conservative media is that the former president cannot have a fair trial in Washington, where he won just 5% of the vote in the 2020 elections. pro-Trump union, where the former president accumulated nearly 70% of the votes cast in the last election. “I think West Virginia would be a great place to try this case,” he told CBS.

Most legal experts think that a change of venue is unlikely. Such a measure would implicitly strike at the heart of the legal system, as it would suggest that verdicts and juries in one jurisdiction are more valid than those in others, and could set a precedent that politicians could choose juries in politically advantageous regions.

Former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, one of the few Republicans running for the 2024 nomination on an explicitly anti-Trump platform, insisted that Trump could get a fair trial in the nation’s capital.

“I believe that judges can be fair. I believe in the American people,” Christie told CNN .

Christie, a former federal prosecutor in a blue state, also rejected the argument that Trump’s post-election conduct is protected by the First Amendment’s free speech guarantee. He argued that the proof of Trump’s culpability lies in his failure to immediately stop his supporters’ invasion of the US Capitol during the certification of Biden’s victory on January 6, 2021.

“He didn’t do it. He sat down, had his hamburger in the White House Dining Room that he has in the Oval Office, and had a good time watching what was going on,” Christie said.