Trump is nervous about the special counsel — and that’s why he begged Republicans to help: Mueller prosecutor
Andrew Weissmann, who previously worked as a prosecutor with special counsel Robert Mueller's team, explained that former President Donald Trump seems to be running scared to the House Republicans for help as the Justice Department probes continue.
Speaking to MSNBC on Thursday, Weissmann discussed Trump's failed attempt to block former Vice President Mike Pence from testifying to special counsel Jack Smith. The only option left for Trump is to appeal to the Supreme Court with his executive privilege argument, but the legal experts don't think it would be successful.
When it comes to the documents scandal, Trump's lawyers sent a bombastic letter to the Republican House Intelligence Committee chairman Wednesday, asking that they intervene and stop the Justice Department from investigating the documents Trump took from the White House and refused to return. The letter focused entirely on the first 15 boxes that Trump handed over after some persuasion by the National Archives. What happened in the year that followed, however, was a battle between Trump and the FBI over the rest of the documents he'd been hiding at his Florida country club.
"I think this is basically a PR move, and I don't mean that in a disparaging way. That's sometimes all you really can do when your defense counsel is signaled to your allies what kind of things they should be saying. There's no way that Congress, the House and the Senate, and then the president are going to be intervening to say that the Department of Justice cannot go forward on a case," he continued.
"Why didn't the former president return them and apparently obstruct the investigation as well?" he asked. "So, it isn't in any way a complete defense that's been articulated, but I think it's sort of the best you can do if you're defense counsel with a very, very difficult set of facts."
Weissmann explained that this is a perfect example of the desperation Trump's legal team is suffering under. So, they're going for a PR defense or making hay politically.
And "try and get the House to do what they're doing with Alvin Bragg to try and in some way get the public to disagree with what's going on here," he explained. "But as I said, it's really — at most, it is a sort of partial PR defense because it does not deal with why the former president didn't just return these."
He explained that the one thing the document revealed was a new excuse for why they ended up at Mar-a-Lago, blaming a staffer for raking everything into a box without sifting through it.
"In other words, if he just mistakenly took them, why didn't he just do what Mike Pence has done and say, 'Oh, here's what we have, and I'm going to turn this over, and you can come look at all the documents to make sure they're actually all returned,'" Weissmann closed. "So it's really not a great pr move as I said, remember, this is defense counsel, and you know, sometimes you don't have a lot to work with."
See the full discussion in the video below or at the link here.
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