Trump lawyers have filed a 'throw-the-spaghetti-at-the-wall' motion: legal expert

Two legal experts this week said that actions by special counsel Jack Smith's office have exposed the incompetence of one of the lawyers representing a Trump codefendant in the Mar-a-Lago documents case.

At one point, the attorney representing co-defendant Carlos de Oliveira confessed that, over the course of the past several months, he's had serious trouble viewing the exhibits, including the videos from Mar-a-Lago's security cameras, because he doesn't own a computer.

Speaking to legal analysts Andrew Weissmann and Bradley Moss on Monday evening, MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell asked if the men had ever seen anything like it.

Weissmann -- who has worked as the FBI general counsel, as a prosecutor, as the assistant U.S. attorney at the Eastern District of New York prosecuting mob cases, and now at NYU Law School -- said he'd never seen anything like it.

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"I can tell you, though, if you are a government prosecutor, what you are worried about is you cannot just say, 'Gee, this should not slow things up because it's the defendant's own doing,'" he explained. "It's his own counsel that you're worried about. It is that claim later of ineffective assistance of counsel."

Such a claim could score an appeal later.

He explained that it's why the DOJ lawyers immediately responded, offering assistance to the lawyer and the proper equipment to help him carry out his duties as competent counsel.

"It is just one of many, many things that the government goes out of its way to address in this brief," Weissmann continued.

The first section of the filing is like a polite guide for Judge Aileen Cannon, "to make sure she does not go off track," said Weissmann. It also goes out of its way to debunk claims by Trump and his allies that the FBI search to retrieve the documents from Mar-a-Lago was a politically motivated raid.

"It goes through chapter and verse and very much answers the question of why did they have to engage in the search of Mar-a-Lago," Weissmann said. "It goes through each of the steps that the National Archives undertook. Why DOJ got involved. The limited communications with the White House that the defense knew about and agreed to."

In fact, it was government staff that worked with Trump for over a year before it finally told him that, as a last recourse, they were going to talk to the FBI. Trump still wouldn't hand over the documents. The FBI subpoenaed him. He gave back some, but far short of all of them. In particular, Trump refused to turn over his so-called Kim Jong-Un "love" letters.

Moss explained that most lawyers don't use the kind of language in court that Trump's team does, as judges quickly tire of what Moss described as "political hyperbole."

"When you look at that motion that [Trump's team] had filed, this motion to compel, this was the throw-the-political-spaghetti-at-the-wall motion," Moss characterized. "Let's take every ridiculous conspiratorial theory that's crossed Trump's desk over the last year and a half. Everything is heard on Newsmax or Fox or whatever, and let's just throw it at the wall and see if we can, if nothing else, just muck up the process."

See the full analysis from Weissmann and Moss in the video below or at the link here.

How Trump co-defendant could have appeals due to incompetent counselyoutu.be