Former President Donald Trump is already trialing some of his potential defenses in court for the January 6 charges in public. However, argued former Solicitor General Neal Katyal on CNN Thursday, none of them are likely to work — and his legal team appears to know it.
"The arguments we're hearing from Trump's legal team, as well as his supporters and backers on Capitol Hill — essentially they say he has a First Amendment right to say things that are not true, that no one can prove he didn't actually believe the election was stolen, and that he was listening to bad advice from his lawyers, advice of counsel," said anchor Anderson Cooper. "Do they work?"
"So far I haven't heard a credible story for any of those arguments," said Katyal. "So the First Amendment has been litigated a lot in conspiracy cases. Defendants all the time say it was just speech, all I was doing was speech. And what the courts routinely do is they say, if it has some sort of action component to it, like if I order you to murder someone, that's just my speech, but it's of course a crime. It's a crime committed through speech. And here the indictment starting at page 2 says, look, we are not punishing Donald Trump for his speech. He can say whatever he wants. It's what he did with that speech, it's the commencement of actions, it's the fake electors plot, it's trying to interfere with the counting of votes on January 6th and the like."...
