All posts tagged "Attorneys"

Donald Trump can't yet be forced to disclose if he plans to rely on a defense that would shift blame to his lawyers, Judge Cannon ruled on Friday.

Special Counsel Jack Smith tried to force the former president to disclose his reliance on the defense, a move legal experts said would force Trump into a trap in which he gives up information that would otherwise be protected by attorney-client privilege.

But Cannon shut down that request, according to Katie Phang, a legal analyst for MSNBC....

For months former President Donald Trump called on his "inner sanctum" to suss out who might rat and also preemptively manufacture opposition research as a measure to sully potential betrayers who might take a plea in exchange for testifying against him, according to a Rolling Stone report.

Relying on on multiple sources, the story claims that Trump's "inner sanctum" have been busy since the summer trying to "ascertain which imperiled Trump allies have been inching toward cutting deals."

So far, the "fact-finding" missions have failed at satisfying Trump's "demands to know who is preparing to snitch."...

The ship is sinking with everybody clinging for a plea deal life-vest.

Former federal prosecutor and historian John Flannery foresees a reckoning now that so many in former President Donald Trump's orbit have flipped to become either state or federal witnesses for the prosecution.

"The rats are leaving the ship, you know," Flannery told Ari Melber during a Tuesday appearance on MSNBC's "The Beat."...

Justice Department prosecutors are reportedly looking into allegations that former President Donald Trump's close associate Rudy Giuliani is a heavy and problematic drinker, which, if the former president was aware of it, would potentially undermine any defense that he was acting on the good-faith advice of counsel when he tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

But that might not even matter, argued former Mueller investigation prosecutor Andrew Weissmann on MSNBC Wednesday, because there's a much simpler way the advice of counsel defense fails: there's no evidence Giuliani actually advised Trump to do many of the most controversial things he did in the election plot.

"I have got to say, listening to that tape, Andrew, of Trump saying, I know what happens to people when they drink, the relationship he and his own family have had towards alcohol, and alcohol dependency, the fact that he does not drink, purely on a sort of client-lawyer basis, does it surprise you that he would have sought the advice of Rudy Giuliani, if he was demonstrably inebriated when he was giving him, already, accepted, controversial advice?" asked host Alex Wagner....

Donald Trump has a good chance of separating his case from the other defendants in Georgia, and that goes hand in hand with his strategy, a former prosecutor said Thursday.

"Those lawyers, crooked lawyers that have been charged, know that Trump is going to be pointing the finger at them in a joint trial," former federal prosecutor Renato Mariotti said on MSNBC's The 11th Hour with Stephanie Ruhle.

"I think the bottom line is that ultimately at the end of the day, Letitia James is ready, and I think as an investigator pointed out... all of this means is we will have more live-streamed, public trials, basically dragging Donald Trump," he continued....

In the January 6 indictment of former President Donald Trump, special counsel Jack Smith names six unindicted co-conspirators, without identifying them directly.

However, Smith left a number of clues in his descriptions of those co-conspirators' actions, and The New York Times pieced together those hints to make educated guesses about whom these accomplices are.

"Co-conspirator 1 is described in the indictment as an 'attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign would not,'" reported Alan Feuer. The Times ultimately didn't have to do much sleuthing on this one: Robert Costello, the attorney representing Rudy Giuliani, has said that this "appears" to refer to his client, adding that the indictment "eviscerates the First Amendment."...