An attorney for Donald Trump has asked New York attorney general to drop her sprawling fraud lawsuit against the president-elect, and a legal expert highlighted one portion of his letter that stood out as "grotesque."
D. John Sauer, one of Trump's immunity lawyers he recently tapped as solicitor general, sent a letter Tuesday arguing that dropping the case was “necessary for the health of our Republic,” and former prosecutor Harry Litman admits in his "Talking Feds" Substack that he lost his cool over one section in the filing.
"Sauer tries to paint a portrait of Trump as a benevolent uniter, urging Americans to put country over partisan strife," Litman wrote. "It is as attractive a product as Trump’s thousand-dollar made-in-China Bible. It is Trump, of course, who is the chief cause of the partisan strife, and his submission, far from being in the interest of the greater good of the country, is a characteristically self-centered ploy to get away with millions of dollars in civil liability and elude the consequences of the legal system and his own wrongdoing."
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The attorney cites George Washington's farewell address warning against "the spirit of revenge," which Trump had made a centerpiece of his re-election campaign, but Litman found that reference more ridiculous and pompous than outrageous.
"At this point in the letter, I found myself still cool-headed and analytical, somewhat offended but also amused at the pretentious, inappropriate rhetoric," Litman wrote. "But for people like me who believe that Lincoln was our greatest and most important president, a savior of our democracy at its hour of greatest risk (except perhaps the present), Sauer’s closing words, anchored to today’s Thanksgiving holiday, are hard to read with equanimity."
Lincoln issued his Thanksgiving Proclamation on Oct. 3, 1863, establishing the holiday, calling on Americans to set aside their bitter divisions amid the Civil War, and Sauer asked a judge to dismiss the $350 million fraud judgment against the former president in that same spirit – much to the consternation of Litman.
"This is grotesque on too many levels to easily count," Litman wrote. "To begin with the first words of Lincoln that Sauer quotes, it’s hard to think of any figure in American politics who is less solemn, reverential, and, in particular, grateful than Trump; and his candidacy, campaign, and rule, in fact, foster and depend on the mean-spirited and deep divide in the hearts and voices of the nation. The cynicism of his invocation of God in light of the life he has led is familiar territory, but the particular call to God to heal the wounds of the nation is hard to swallow coming from the principal source of those divisions. And the identification of those high-minded and unselfish goals cuts exactly against the grain of the actual request that Trump be granted yet another unearned escape from the operation of the rule of law."
"The deep disconnect here runs ultimately to history and language themselves," Litman added. "In his first term, Trump used to rate himself the nation’s greatest president except possibly Lincoln. At the time, it prompted snickers; but it’s not so funny now in the face of Trump’s limitless pretentiousness and unapologetic exploitation of public power for personal ends. And there’s a deep profanity in the application of Lincoln’s words — embryonic versions of the unsurpassed rhetoric of the Second Inaugural — to Trump’s dull-witted and contemptuous demand to get off yet another legal hook."