One of the big problems former President Donald Trump will face, now that the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case is entering a new phase, is learning that many of his professed loyalists are secretly looking to save themselves, argued former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner on MSNBC's "The ReidOut."
This comes as a new report reveals a Trump PAC has paid millions of dollars to provide the former president's co-defendants with legal counsel.
"Trump is now going to know who got offered deals," said anchor Joy Reid. "And then what could he do with that?"
"Well, first of all, what could Trump do with it?" said Kirschner. "He could — let me use the term 'mob lawyer.' I'm not accusing anybody of being a mob lawyer, but when we hear the term, what does that conjure up? The mob boss gets a lawyer or lawyers for all of his underlings, his wise guys, because he wants to keep them all close. He wants to keep them into the fold, and here is the thing. The Sixth Amendment right to counsel in the Constitution provides that not only does everybody have a right to counsel, you have a right to zealous counsel, effective counsel and, most importantly for our purposes here, conflict-free counsel."
The upshot, Kirschner said, is that "it's going to be so important for the prosecutors to do whatever they can — and there are some things that they can do. They can ask a judge to appoint conflict-free counsel for purposes of broaching possible cooperation if you know the lawyer happens to be somebody doing the boss' bidding rather than representing the interest of the client."
"But this has to drive Donald Trump nuts every time he gets a discovery dump like this," added Kirschner. "He is seeing in black and white that more people who were telling him at Mar-a-Lago, 'You the man, it's a witch hunt, you did nothing wrong' — now he sees what they are really saying and it's got to drive him nuts, but the sense is you know, he knows that indictments are coming."
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