A legal expert believes Donald Trump is seeking to convince potential jurors that he couldn’t have committed crimes in connection with the Jan. 6 attack on the Capital if he didn’t believe what he was doing was illegal, but that the former president's legal strategy isn’t going anywhere.
And this isn't the first time he’s doing it, former DOJ Acting Assistant Attorney General for National Security Mary McCord said Thursday during an appearance on MSNBC’s “All In with Chris Hayes.”
“This pattern we see with Trump, I mean, a lot of it is playing to the public, but I think he knows that juries, grand juries, and petit juries, the ones who sit in trial, are also all part of that public that he's been playing to for so long,” McCord said.
Hayes likened Trump’s legal strategy to a delusional defendant in a bank heist who claims holding up a teller isn’t a crime because the robber was only reclaiming money that belonged to them in the first place.
“Even if you genuinely believe that, you're not in good shape,” Hayes said.
“In every matter, what he does is he creates, in a way, this alternate reality for himself,” McCord said.
“In the Mar-a-Lago documents case it's that he had the power to determine that all presidential records were actually personal records, or on a different day…he might also say that he actually declassified them all, and then he lives in that world, I think in order to almost to create what he thinks is going to be a defense, you know. I couldn't have committed a crime when I was so overwhelmingly out there saying these things, but that’s just not how the law works, and I think that that's going to fail in this case."
“If there is an indictment brought and if that's what he tries…his purported lack of knowledge that he lost is not going to be a legal defense here.”
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