Trump plans to toss John Eastman and Giuliani under the bus to escape Jan. 6 conviction: report

A new report from Rolling Stone claims that Donald Trump's legal team is planning to blame the former president's prior lawyers if he gets hit with criminal charges over his effort to illegally remain in power after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.

According to the publication's sources, Trump's lawyers are planning to argue that he was misled by attorneys John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani about the legal feasibility of having Vice President Mike Pence unilaterally throw out certified election results to declare Trump the winner.

One source told the publication that the strategy of blaming the lawyers he chose to listen to over the objections of his own White House counsel and senior officials of his own Department of Justice is "an argument the [former] president likes, and the team is on board with it."

The source then added that "John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel... Other people can decide how sound it was."

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But Steven Groves, a one-time Trump spokesperson, expressed skepticism about such a strategy to Rolling Stone, as he said that Trump would clearly be stretching the limits of an advice-of-counsel defense were he to employ it.

"As a lawyer, I can’t tell my client: Look, there’s this obscure, ancient law that I found that says you can kill your wife," he said. "If the client goes out and kills his wife, it doesn’t really work if the client turns around and says, ‘Well, wait, my lawyer told me I could do that.'"