12,324 views Aug 8, 2023
Donald Trump's newest lawyer John Lauro is proving to be just as bad as the rest of his legal team. Over the weekend, Lauro decided to make the rounds of the Sunday morning talk shows where he continued to admit that Trump DID do the things he's been indicted for, but insisted the context of everything was wrong. This is not a stellar legal defense at all - in fact, it isn't a DEFENSE at all - and his lawyer is doing more harm than good at this point, as Farron Cousins explains. Link - https://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefi...
*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos. On Sunday, Donald Trump's newest lawyer, John Laro, the person who like so many others before him, was supposed to come along and be the adult in the room. And Donald Trump's legal team guy's got a decent resume. He was a pretty good lawyer. And then he joined Trump's team and immediately became just as incompetent as everybody else on Trump's team, because on Sunday, Mr. Laro decided to make the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows. He went on CNN's, uh, state of the Union, NBC's meet the press, you know, trying to downplay the latest indictment against his client. And in both of those appearances, Mr. Laro admitted that Trump did do the things that the indictment says he did. He had already actually made the same claim. When he went on TV on Friday, it was like, yeah, I mean, he did this thing, but over the weekend he kind of tried to tighten up his message and he was like, okay, so he did the things, but it's okay that he did it because, you know, we think it's different context than what the indictment says. So, you know, the context of the way he said things totally matters. It doesn't, and the context that Mr. Laro is trying to sell to people is not the reality. But let me read you what he said. Here's what he said during the first appearance, this one, or maybe it was the second, I don't even care, uh, on C n N, he said, asking is aspirational. Asking is not action. It's core free speech. The press should be defending free speech. What President Trump was doing is within the reality and the realm of free speech, he's asking his vice president, what about taking this course of action? Ultimately, as vice president rejected all of the proposals that were made, what President Trump did do, uh, did not do is direct Vice President Mike Pence to do anything he asked him in an aspirational way, asking is covered by the First Amendment. Mike Pence is on the record now as saying, Donald Trump's lawyers came to me and told me to do this. And by do this, he meant delay the certification of the electoral college votes. Sending the legal team in to ask the vice president to delay a congressional action is literally one of the things in the indictment. Like that's one of the things Trump has been indicted for. That's one of the charges. And Mr. Laura's out there like, Hey, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's just an ask. We're we're allowed to ask people. We just can't tell them they have to. You can't direct them, but you can ask them. No, actually you cannot, especially when it's part of a broader conspiracy, which of course is exactly what Jack Smith laid out in the indictment. Mr. Loro Continued over on N B C and this time talking about Georgia. President Trump had every right to ask the Secretary of State, I believe that this election was conducted improperly. There were deficiencies here. I want to see if there are more than 10,000 votes or whatever the number was that were counted illegally. And once again, that's core political speech. That wasn't a threat at all. What, what he was asking for is for Raff Asperger to get the truth. He believed that there were in excess of 10,000 votes that were counted illegally. And what he was asking for is the Secretary of State to act appropriately and find these votes that were counted illegally. That was an aspirational ask. He's entitled to petition even state government. So everything that Trump did, Mr. Lo says, yeah, he did it, but he did it aspirationally. Like this is something we should all aspire to, which is where aspirational comes from. We should aspire to not count fraudulent votes that he knew didn't exist. We should aspire to throw out the results of the 2020 election because Trump didn't win. Uh, here's the thing. Lemme go ahead and counter what you said on Georgia as well, because he wasn't asking. He was not asking because we've all heard the phone call.
