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It’s difficult to not feel a bit for Donald Trump’s attorneys… at least the real ones who are trying to do a job and not the crackpots like John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani, and Sidney Powell, all of whom played their own roles in trying to subvert the will of the American people.
Sure, these lawyers are well compensated, courtesy of the donations gullible conservatives keep sending Trump, but it can’t be easy to represent a man who is facing 91 criminal counts in four jurisdictions, keeps going on TV to admit his guilt to various crimes, and tries to intimidate judges and witnesses.
Essentially, their job is like trying to represent a hyperactive toddler with crumbs on his face and chocolate on his fingers in a case about who stole the fudge brownies.
There have been some limited (and surprising) successes. For example, Trump’s attorneys apparently managed to talk the former president out of holding another self-incriminating event next week in which he promised to release “a Large, Complex, Detailed but irrefutable REPORT on the Presidential Election Fraud which took place in Georgia” (erratic capitalization is Trump’s own).
In what was undoubtedly a Herculean task involving unimaginable patience and pandering, Trump’s lawyers got him to reverse course.
“Rather than releasing the Report on the Rigged & Stolen Georgia 2020 Presidential Election on Monday, my lawyers would prefer putting this, I believe, Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities in formal Legal Filings as we fight to dismiss this disgraceful Indictment,” Trump wrote on his website Truth Social Thursday night.
With that crisis averted, the lawyers of the former president went back to their main task at hand for now: delaying all of the trials for as long as humanly possible.
As we pointed out, while an innocent man in possession of “Irrefutable & Overwhelming evidence of Election Fraud & Irregularities” may want to get his case before a jury as quickly as possible (at least those related to his failed coup), Trump is not that man.
Therefore, his lawyers on Thursday asked the court to delay the start of the federal case related to the former president’s attempt to overturn the 2020 election for at least 2.5 years.
While that seems excessive and it would be better for the country to get Trump to court more quickly, their reasoning is sound: There is too much evidence against their client.
In their court filing from Thursday, they note that the volume of documents that special counsel Jack Smith has compiled is extraordinary.
“11.5 million pages is a difficult number to comprehend. Ordinarily, a complex, document-intensive criminal case might have a million pages at issue,” Trump lawyers John Lauro and Todd Blanche wrote. “To have over ten times that many pages at issue, against a single defendant, is largely unheard of.”
That seems appropriate. After all, having a US president lose an election and then try to stay in power by overturning the results of that election is also unheard of.
By the way, in making their case, the attorneys also showed that one of Trump’s own arguments for claiming that these cases were brought now to interfere in the GOP primary (and the general election) is pretty dumb.
The former president has repeatedly (and curiously) suggested that he should have been indicted some time ago.
However, as it turns out, when you build a case against a man who leaves massive amounts of evidence in his wake, things take a bit more time.
