Former President Donald Trump’s legal defense against federal criminal charges for trying to overturn the 2020 election is beginning to take shape.
During a speech in New Hampshire Tuesday, Trump argued, as his lawyers have in recent days, that his statements about the election were constitutionally protected speech. He claimed that his First Amendment rights are under attack — not just because he was indicted in connection to his repeated lies that the election had been stolen from him, but also because prosecutors are seeking a protective order preventing him from speaking publicly about evidence revealed as part of the discovery process in the case.
“I’ll be the only politician in American history not allowed to speak because of our corrupt system,” he told the crowd.
John Lauro, a member of his legal team, argued on CNN earlier this week that Trump “had every right to advocate for his position” — including when he “asked” Pence to throw out Electoral College votes from certain states on January 6, 2021 — and that his advocacy is now “being criminalized.”
And Trump pushed back Tuesday on the notion that he knew he had lost the election but sought to overturn the results anyway — what may become a sticking point as prosecutors attempt to convince jurors that he had criminal intent.
Altogether, those statements suggest that Trump’s team appears to be currently pursuing three lines of legal defense: that his speech is protected under the First Amendment, that he didn’t order Pence to participate in an illegal scheme to stop the certification of the election results, and that he couldn’t have criminal intent if he didn’t truly understand he had lost.
It might be too early to tell whether those defenses will prove enough to acquit Trump. And we still don’t know the full breadth of the evidence that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith has in his possession, though many legal experts say the indictment is…
Read the full article here