Trump will not be able to use the defense he thought there was a fraud — there’s too much evidence: legal expert
The panel discussion at the top of "Deadline White House" attacked the Justice Department for being slow to do something targeting Donald Trump around the Jan. 6 attack.
New York Times' Glenn Thrush reported with his colleagues on Sunday that special counsel Jack Smith was finally homing in on Trump as he subpoenas former Vice President Mike Pence.
MSNBC's Nicolle Wallace and former Sen. Claire McCaskill (D-MO) both criticized the DOJ, saying that they couldn't understand why it has taken so long when it's clear that the House Select Committee found significantly more than the DOJ had.
Former FBI agent Peter Strzok said that he believes the DOJ started with the bottom up, using the 1,000 or so attackers at the Capitol instead of starting with Donald Trump's inner circle.
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"I think, a lot of us were looking saying, hey there is some question. Why you aren't looking sooner at the people higher up in the chain?" said Strzok. "But there is every bit of evidence that they are doing that right now. So, keep in mind, you have to deal with nearly a thousand perpetrators, people who have been charged who are on the ground. But one, you have to take care of those people and, two, the nature of an investigation is you want to build from the bottom up. When you get to the level of someone like Mark Meadows or Trump certainly, you need almost always someone on the inside who will tell you what those conversations were and what the state of mind was and people aren't going to do that voluntarily."
Former prosecutor Barbara McQuade, who now teaches at the University of Michigan School of Law, was asked about the Jan. 6 witnesses revealing a plethora of evidence showing that Trump knew he had lost the election.
"People like Bill Barr and Rich Donahue and including this [Cyber] Ninja or whatever they were called -- the kind of companies that the Trump campaign would commission to go find/manufacture fraud," Wallace said. "They too came up empty-handed. What is the significance of proving that all of Trump's inputs, everybody he sought either confirmation bias from or information from or peddling his theories to, said, 'No, sir, there is nothing there. You lost.'"
McQuade explained that the evidence becomes so overwhelming at one point that even a reasonable juror can easily see Trump knew he'd lost.
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"It seems like that is one important aspect they're trying to button down," she said of the DOJ. "The more people you could get who could say, 'he was told he lost,' 'he knew he lost,' and especially this reporting about this Berkeley Research Group that did their independent investigation of all of the leads. They came back and said they haven't been able to substantiate any claims. They're all false. At some point, I think that no matter how much Donald Trump said 'I have no idea, I thought I won.' At some point that does not ring true."
She called it the "ostrich instruction" where jurors have to make a decision of whether the witness could have reasonably put their head in the sand and blocked out all possible logic. She recalled the infamous scene from "Casablanca" where the police chief proclaims "I am shocked, shocked to see there is gambling going on here!" Then the manager hands him his winnings.
"He's using willful blindness," said McQuade. "At some point, a jury will believe that despite that he had no idea that the election lies were false, even if the evidence is so overwhelming that a jury could believe that he did know."
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