51,204 views Aug 6, 2023
Donald Trump's legal team - and many other Republicans in both Congress and the media - are trying to claim that the indictments this week are an attack on Donald Trump's freedom of speech. If his legal team walks into court and makes this claim, they can be certain of a swift conviction of the former president. These are serious charges with decades of jail time on the line, and they want to falsely make it about freedom of speech. Ring of Fire's Farron Cousins explains what's happening. Link - https://www.huffpost.com/entry/willia...
This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos. So it appears that Donald Trump and his legal team have decided upon a strategy on how to defeat these new indictments once it comes time for the trial, their strategy. In addition to trying to say that Trump totally believed that all these things happened, they're also going to argue that Donald Trump is being prosecuted for his speech, and that the entire indictment is nothing more than a violation of Donald Trump's first amendment rights. That is what his lawyers have said this week. That is what conservative politicians have said. That is what conservative pundits have said. They're all attempting to frame this as some kind of attack on Donald Trump's freedom of speech, and they wanna walk into court and tell a jury that, Hey, the only thing my client is guilty of is talking, and that's, that's legal. You can't arrest him for talking. If that is the legal strategy that Donald Trump's lawyers want to, uh, pull out when they get into court, then this is gonna be a very quick trial, and it's gonna result in Donald Trump being convicted on all charges and possibly spending the next 55 years in prison, because that might be one of the dumbest, one of the dumbest criminal defenses I've ever heard. Even Donald Trump's handpicked former attorney General William Barr, came out this week and talked about how stupid that defense is because Donald Trump is not being prosecuted for his speech. He's being prosecuted for his actions. Now, I explained it this way on the Ring of Fire podcast this week, but I'll go ahead and explain it this way here. If I were sitting around with a group of my friends and I said, guys, wouldn't it be awesome if we robbed a bank? Like, wouldn't that solve all of our financial problems if we just had like the big pile of money that the bank is hiding? So, yeah, it'd be totally cool if we robbed a bank, and if I stop the conversation right there and it doesn't go any further whatsoever, you can't arrest me for that. But if I take that conversation a step further and I continue having that conversation with you every day for months, and then it gets to the point where I tell you this, all right, listen, I've befriended some of the employees at the bank, so I'm gonna call them and I'm gonna ask them if they will shut off their security footage. You know, shut off all the security cameras, all the laser grids, all that, shut 'em off at 9:00 PM on Tuesday. So then at 9 0 5, we will show up at the bank and we will go in and rob it. They're gonna leave the doors unlocked for us, easy peasy. They're gonna do all the hard work. We just have to go in and get the money. If I do that, and I start making these phone calls to my friends at the bank telling them, this is what you do, here's the plan, here's the time. At that point, it becomes a conspiracy. And that is a hundred percent illegal. That is effectively according to the indictment what Donald Trump and his co-conspirators did. 'cause they weren't just out there talking about voter fraud and saying, oh, I wish we could overturn the election. They were making the phone calls. They were making the phone calls during the actual capital riot. They were calling lawmakers, telling them, uh, you gotta delay the certification, delay, delay, delay, which is one of the charges, you know, obstructing an official proceeding.
