Legal expert pours cold water on Trump using ‘public fatigue’ to walk on Jan. 6 charges

More and more evidence is linking Donald Trump and his family to the Jan. 6 insurrection, but a legal expert explained how the former president and his allies may try to use public fatigue to evade accountability.

The former president's eldest son Donald Trump Jr. sent text messages two days after Election Day to then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows laying out strategies for overturning the election results, which weren't even finalized, and MSNBC legal analyst Joyce Vance explained the significance of the revelations.

"The question of whether to indict has to be an evidence-specific case and there are a lot of moving pieces," said Vance, a former U.S. Attorney. "I have sympathy for what DOJ prosecutors are looking at. There are issues as varied as a First Amendment defense, for instance, whether or not the speech that was used on the Ellipse is protected by the Constitution, and whether that could prevent a prosecution. That's just one of the many things prosecutors have to parse."

Many Americans would prefer to move on from the insurrection, which Republicans have downplayed as insignificant, but Vance said that should't matter to prosecutors.

"There's a lot fatigue in the court of public opinion, but that's not how prosecutions work," Vance said. "If DOJ decides that the law and the evidence merits prosecution, then a jury will be assembled in the United States District Court in the District of Columbia. That jury will hear evidence, not this entire enormous mess that really, I think, has created fatigue in the public, but they will hear very specific evidence on each of the elements of crimes that are charged, and they will make a decision about whether anyone charged with those crimes is guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. Something we've seen over and over in these cases, I remember the prosecution of Paul Manafort is that citizens serving as jurors can set aside their preconceptions and biases and hear the evidence and reach the ruling. It is a very different enterprise from the court of public opinion."

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