Former Department of Justice lawyer lays out what Trump's legal team will have planned

Former Justice Department official Mary McCord, in a Q&A about the recent indictment of Donald Trump, has given her view on his case so far – and what she would do differently if tasked with defending the former president.

Speaking to Washington Post associate editor Ruth Marcus, McCord began by saying she was surprised by just how detailed the indictment was. While she and other legal eagles assumed that it would have to be bullet-proof, what it detailed "was, frankly, even stronger than I expected. ... By stronger I mean the evidence of obstructive conduct — failure to cooperate, failure to return classified information that had been requested, was far more fulsome than even I had imagined and went back much further in time," she said.

McCord was the acting assistant attorney general for national security at the U.S. Department of Justice from 2016 to 2017 and principal deputy assistant attorney general for national security from 2014 to 2016. But if she was serving as the defense attorney for Trump, she shared a few things she'd already be working on.

"They will probably be seeking to delay any trial. I’ve been trying to debate what is actually better for Trump: Is it to go to trial before the election or to have this hanging over his head because, as we know, he’s fundraising on it? Being convicted before the election would, I think, be very devastating," she began.

She explained that it also only takes one juror to disagree to hang the jury, though she predicted Trump has "zero chance" of being acquitted.

"Acquittal would require unanimity among all 12 jurors, but one juror can hang it. So I think his lawyers will try to delay because that’s always been their tactic," said McCord.

"And they’ll do that not through necessarily illegitimate means; they’ll do that through filing motions. I think they will try to get the judge in Florida, Aileen Cannon, to revisit the D.C. court’s determination that the testimony and notes of the former president’s former attorney in this case, Evan Corcoran, had to be put before the grand jury because of the crime-fraud exception to the attorney client privilege. I think they’ll argue that [former Trump lawyer Michael] Cohen’s testimony shouldn’t be admissible at a trial and that his notes shouldn’t be admissible."

Trump's lawyers have already protested, unsuccessfully, the federal court decision that there was enough evidence of a crime to allow the breach of attorney-client privilege and allow notes taken by attorney Evan Corcoran as evidence. They're expected to challenge that again.

"I think they will also raise a lot of discovery issues," McCord suggested. "This is not a case where the government can just right now say, 'Hey, here’s all the evidence and documents; we’re going to send ten boxes to wherever you want them, and you can look at them.' This is a case where much of the evidence will have to be reviewed in a sensitive [compartmented] information facility, known as a SCIF, within the courthouse, which means I can already imagine his attorneys saying, 'This is not convenient for us. We need more time to review the documents than we ordinarily would, because we can’t even take them home.'"

Read the full interview with McCord at The Washington Post.