Analysis: Ever heard Trump talk about how he can keep material under the Presidential Records Act? Defense du jour. This argument that the latest indictment is eviscerated by the First Amendment?
They can’t simply cede the legal point, of course, but the bar for what serves as a credible legal rebuttal to the charges Trump faces is low. So Trump and his allies throw out various putatively legalistic responses, each of which needs only to overcome the legal scrutiny of Trump’s supporters, not a federal judge.
“I used to call it ‘defense du jour,’” Weissmann said, walking through several from the first Smith indictment centered on classified documents: that evidence was planted or that Trump could simply declassify things mentally. “It’s like, let’s see what plays.”Ever heard Trump talk about how he can keep material under the Presidential Records Act? Defense du jour. This argument that the latest indictment is eviscerated by the First Amendment? Same.
The best example of this, of course, came in the weeks after the 2020 election. Trump offered a constant stream of false allegations of fraud, cheating or wrongdoing — each of which was debunked or dismissed, though many of which survive to this day. In court, though, his lawyers were far more careful, recognizing that blanket, indefensible assertions about vote-stealing would not fly. There was a gulf between what was argued in court and what was presented publicly.
So Team Trump takes a meme off Twitter, makes it look pretty and hands it out outside the courthouse. It was the defense of that particular, a way to pivot his legal troubles into an accessible political victory. If such ploys keep just enough people engaged and loyal for him to win the Republican nomination and then the presidency? Then they were his best legal bet after all.
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