CNN is reporting that former President Donald Trump's lawyers are plotting a multi-pronged defense strategy aimed at establishing that he had good-faith reasons to believe that the 2020 election was stolen from him.
One of the strategies will reportedly involve accusing officials in the intelligence community of "political bias" against Trump, which they hope could convince jurors that he had legitimate reason to distrust their claims that the 2020 election results were accurate.
However, CNN notes that there's a major problem with this defense: Many of the people who told Trump that the election wasn't stolen weren't career government officials but people whom he personally chose to serve in his administration.
"Several of Trump’s former Cabinet members -- such as then-Attorney General Bill Barr, then-Vice President Mike Pence and several top intelligence officials -- could be called to testify against him at the trial," CNN writes. "Many were vocal after the election that there was no widespread fraud and have in recent months criticized Trump."
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As if that weren't enough, CNN notes that special counsel Jack Smith's team has signaled that "they’ve gathered significant evidence of top advisers in both his campaign and administration telling him the results meant he could not win, and that he ignored the facts to rally his supporters to violence."
As the House Select Committee investigating the Capitol attacks showed, multiple Trump appointees testified that he was told repeatedly that he was lobbing out baseless claims of voter fraud and that he nonetheless continued to make them.
