Watergate's John Dean thinks Trump wrote part of his legal team's brief -- because it's so terrible
Former White House counsel for Richard Nixon, John Dean, explained that the legal brief out of President Donald Trump's White House was so bad that it had to have been dictated by Trump himself.
Saturday evening, Trump's legal team, chaired by Trump lawyer Jay Sekulow and White House counsel Pat Cipollone, filed their own form of a legal brief that responded to the case filed by Democrats ahead of Tuesday's impeachment trial.
The document called the proceedings “constitutionally invalid” and claims House Democrats are staging a “dangerous attack” with a “brazen and unlawful attempt to overturn the results of the 2016 election and interfere with the 2020 election.”
During a Sunday appearance on CNN, Dean explained that the legal brief from the Trump team was a "scorched Earth" move.
"I think it's actually going to insult some of the lawyers in the Senate if their more detailed brief is of the same tone, they're making a serious mistake. Lawyers are not going to buy into this. Most members of the Senate, both parties are lawyers," said Dean.
He went on to attack the president and his team for attempting to distort the facts, give false statements and pick out small things he's done right to justify his breaking of the law.
"That's really what it was, and the House has evidence, as you well know," said Dean. "Any news person, any person following the news would know it's been going on for months, involving multiple people. It wasn't just two phone calls to the president of Ukraine."
Dean went on to speculate who really wrote the brief was the president himself.
"I actually thought Trump might have dictated part of this brief like he did the letter that Cipollone sent to Congress that said that what they were doing was not proper," Dean also said. "It's of that vernacular. It's not legally sophisticated. It actually plays to the base."
CNN host Ana Cabrera asked if Trump's "scorched Earth" move could actually work for him among the public.
"No," said Dean. "They are not strong legal arguments, and they will not weather the arguments on the floor.'
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