Trump lawyers planted 'deep-state conspiracy waiting to explode': expert

Donald Trump's attorneys introduced a conspiracy theory during cross exam that could help them sow seeds of mistrust inside and outside the courtroom.

Defense attorney Emil Bove asked Doug Daus, a records custodian for the Manhattan district attorney's office, whether data he extracted from two cell phones belonging to Michael Cohen could have been manipulated or deleted by the FBI, and Rubin told MSNBC's "Morning Joe" that was intended to give Trump and his allies another line of attack on the trial itself.

"We're still hearing from a man named Doug Daus," Rubin said. "He is a forensics specialist in the D.A.'s office, [and] his role is to authenticate lots of the stuff taken off Cohen's phone. How did it get from Cohen's phone into the D.A.'s hand? One of the things I thought was really interesting [Thursday] was the insinuation by Trump's team that the data on Cohen's phone could have been manipulated or deleted before it was in the D.A.'s hand."

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Daus testified during cross examination by Trump's attorneys that he had examined the phones provided to Manhattan prosecutors by the FBI, which had initially seized them during their own investigation, but he conceded that he had not had access to data turned up by federal investigators in 2018 or ask for copies of that evidence, which Rubin said could give defense attorneys an opening to call the case into question.

"That is a deep state conspiracy waiting to explode over the weekend, and perhaps engineered, not for the audience of the jurors in this case, but for the larger populous of jurors, a.k.a. voters, who might be interested in hearing something that dovetails with Trump's frequent refrains of this is rigged, this is a witch hunt, they've been out to get me, this is a Biden trial, right?" Rubin said. "Hearing the FBI, for example, could have insufficiently protected the data, or worse, manipulated it themselves, that's a narrative that goes straight to the feedback loop."

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