Former President Donald Trump's lawyers are "worthless," argued former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman on MSNBC's "The Beat" Wednesday, because ultimately Trump is just going to tell them what to do, rather than the other way around, involving them in his own criminal behavior.
Akerman's commentary came during a segment discussing Rudy Giuliani, one of the alleged architects of Trump's scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election, who surrendered himself for booking earlier in the day on racketeering charges in Georgia.
"Mr. Giuliani is arguing that there is some sort of indignity here in this new photograph that we see in the booking, and he's making a — I would say a defense argument that everything he did was lawyering and it's a bad sign, a weakness in the case that they indicted so many lawyers," said anchor Ari Melber, himself an attorney by training. "What do you say to that rebuttal?"
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"Simple: this was the same thing that happened in Watergate," said Akerman. "It was the same problem. Went from John Dean on down into lawyers all throughout the Nixon administration. And that was the big issue that came up after Watergate — what do we do in law schools to teach lawyers to be more ethical? In fact, John Dean was one of the people out there actually going to these sessions and being part of this teaching effort. So this is not something that has happened for the first time. And unfortunately it's because lawyers are in positions of power, and if they abuse that power, they wind up in some cases committing crimes, and that's what happened here and that's what happened in Watergate."
"Could it be relevant in this case for the prosecutors to say, this may not be the first time that Donald Trump has tried to push, demand, cajole, or potentially illegally conspire with his lawyers?" Melber asked him.
"When you come right down to it, anybody who is hired as a lawyer by Donald Trump is basically worthless, in the sense that he doesn't make the shots," said Akerman. "He doesn't call the shots. He doesn't make the decisions. It's Donald Trump that tells the lawyers what to do, and that is why these lawyers follow along without question, and they all wind up getting themselves in trouble. Look at Rudy Giuliani. He's responsible for two impeachments, and now a major RICO indictment."
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