Ex-Trump lawyer smacked down by CNN host for suggesting obstructing elections is reasonable
On Tuesday, former President Donald Trump announced he has received a target letter from special counsel Jack Smith — indicating he is likely to be indicted in connection with the January 6 investigation.
But in conversation with CNN's Kaitlan Collins, former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore defended his onetime client's actions — even suggesting that trying to overturn an election was entirely reasonable given what the former president believed to be true at the time.
"Your former client is responding tonight. This is what he said," said Collins, playing a clip of Trump speaking at a campaign stop in Iowa: "So they can cheat on an election, but if somebody wants to question the cheating they want to call you a conspiracy theorist and all these other things. These people are sick."
"Tim, when you hear that — I mean, what happened was way more than just questioning the results, right?" Collins pressed him.
"Well, and a lot of that is a matter of perspective because, you know, certainly on one hand you could sit there and say all these steps were taken to overturn the results of the election, but on the other hand, if he truly believed that there was fraud — whether you agree with him or not, if he truly believed it and if his team truly believed it, what steps would you expect them to take?" said Parlatore. "You know, you would expect them to take the steps of saying, hey, let's slow down the process and let's try to verify these things, kick it back to the states to make sure that the election results are accurate. So it is definitely one of those things where it's not clear. It can interpreted multiple ways. It's not — it's not as simple as Watergate, where they break into a hotel room and it's a clear crime and anybody on either side of the aisle can see that. Here, it's much more open to interpretation."
"Is it really open to interpretation if you have governors that he was pressuring to do things that — Brian Kemp of Georgia, Doug Ducey of Arizona, they said that they couldn't do?" Collins pressed him. "He was trying to get Mike Pence to do things that Mike Pence said he couldn't do. Of course, we had Rudy Giuliani and these other attorneys going into states and trying to get these slates of fake electors. That's more than questioning. They had 60 court cases that were all thrown out."
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