On the first day of the year 2021, then-President Donald Trump reportedly called his Vice President Mike Pence to abuse him.
Trump was furious that Pence had opposed a lawsuit arguing that the vice president had the power to overturn the 2020 presidential election when Congress certified it on January 6, a degree of authority that Pence had (correctly) concluded he did not possess. When Pence explained his reasoning to Trump, as he had done previously on several other occasions, the president accused Pence of what he presumably saw as a grievous character flaw.
“You’re too honest,” Trump said, according to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump.
This episode, one of the new details in that four-count indictment released Tuesday, serves to underscore the prosecution’s central argument: that Trump knowingly lied about the outcome of the 2020 election in service of a plot to defraud the American people of the right to chose their own leader. To make the case that Trump “defrauded the federal government” and “corruptly” interfered with Congress’s counting of the votes, Smith needs to show that Trump knew that his claims about the election and the law were in fact false. That Trump accuses Pence of being “too honest” is evidence of this corrupt intent.
To rebut this claim, Trump’s legal team is arguing that he truly believed the election was stolen. “I would like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations were false,” Trump attorney John Lauro said in a Thursday evening interview on Fox News.
As a legal matter, this may well be their best defense against the fraud and interference charges. But as a political argument, it’s a disaster: It all but concedes Trump is unfit for the presidency in 2024.
Smith’s indictment lays out a mountain of evidence that Trump should have known the election was not stolen: Top official after top official told him so, as did key…
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