Donald Trump has lost his legal team a week before his impeachment trial in the Senate. According to CNN, the lawyers left when Trump insisted his defense should be re-litigating the “big lie” that he won the election rather than on constitutional grounds.
This isn’t really surprising. It was clear this is what would happen. Now that it looks 99.99% certain that Senate GOPers will not vote to convict he feels he can go back to claims he won in “landslide.”
By insisting that his lawyers argue to the Senate that the election really *was* “stolen,” Trump isn’t just refusing to contest the *actual* ground on which he was impeached (that he incited the violence on January 6); he’s effectively arguing that the violence was *justified.*
— Steve Vladeck (@steve_vladeck) January 31, 2021
Former President Donald Trump’s lies and his insistence that the November election was rigged against him may have turned out to be a bridge too far for the attorneys who were slated to defend him in his upcoming Senate impeachment trial in a little more than a week.
But his party has largely stuck with him. After a brief flirtation with reason and sound judgment in the weeks following the January 6 siege at the Capitol, the Republican Party has decided to honor their deep and often blind allegiance to Trump, choosing to overlook his role in inciting the deadly insurrection rather than pay the price of crossing him and his base next year at the ballot box.
The collapse of Trump’s legal team amid a disagreement over legal strategy, which CNN first reported Saturday night, stood in stark contrast to the slow crawl of Republican elected leaders back into the former President’s corner as the anger lawmakers feel about the insurrection fades and his potential power to help or destroy them in the 2022 elections becomes paramount.
While the Republican Party continues to bend to Trump’s whims, forgive his dangerous behavior, and quiver in the face of his election threats, the judiciary and the legal profession are adhering to a higher ethical standard — and have largely refused to tolerate his efforts to ramrod the nation’s democratic institutions and founding principles throughout his baseless election charade — making the GOP’s loyalty to Trump even more appalling.
A person familiar with the departures of the five attorneys — Butch Bowers, Deborah Barbier, Josh Howard, Johnny Gasser and Greg Harris — told CNN that Trump wanted the attorneys to center his defense on the notion that there was mass election fraud in November and that the election was stolen from him, instead of questioning the legality of convicting a president after he’s left office. Trump was not receptive to the discussions about how they should proceed, according to CNN’s Gloria Borger, Kaitlan Collins, Jeff Zeleny and Ashley Semler.
Some suggest that Trump may go to the Senate and provide his own defense. It would likely be a devastating blow to Republicans in general elections if Trump went to the Senate, argued he won in a landslide rather than mount a strong defense about his role in the insurrection and then Republicans voted to acquit him.
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Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.