(Photo by Win McNamee/Getty)
Friends, let’s give a warm welcome to John Lauro, the newest lawyer throwing his heretofore good reputation on the pyre in sacrifice to Donald J. Trump.
The Tampa-based white collar defender announced this weekend that he’ll be representing the former president with regard to the apparently imminent indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith in connection with the attempt to block certification of President Biden’s electoral victory. Naturally he made a beeline for Fox News to assure the MAGA faithful that the fight against the DEEP STATE WITCH HUNT is in good hands.
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Lauro telegraphed repeatedly that his legal argument will consist of attacks on the independence of the prosecutor, paired with a rehash of the same debunked allegations of election fraud which led Trump’s supporters to storm the Capitol two years ago.
“Look what’s happening to our beautiful country,” he responded to the opening question from host Sandra Smith about whether Trump would accept the special prosecutor’s invitation to appear before the grand jury. “For the first time in our history, a sitting president is using the Department of Justice to go after a political opponent criminally, while that political opponent is leading in the polls.”
He continued with a bizarre claim that the president had some kind of obligation — perhaps under the Take Care Clause? — to disrupt the electoral certification.
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There’s no need to appear in front of any grand jury right now, President Trump did absolutely nothing wrong, he’s done nothing criminal, and he’s made his case that he was entitled to take these positions as president of the United States. When he saw all these election discrepancies and irregularities going on, he did what any president was required to do, because he took an oath to do exactly that.
Lauro went on to suggest that Trump was merely asking that the certification should be paused to allow for an “audit” on January 6, 2021.
The only thing that President Trump asked is a pause in the counting so those seven contested states could either re-audit or re-certify. I’ve never heard of anyone getting indicted for asking for an audit. What President Trump was looking for was the truth, was to find out exactly what happened in those seven contested states. That’s just not criminal.
Remember when those loons rampaged through the halls of Congress shouting “AUDIT MIKE PENCE?”
No?
So weird!
In point of fact, the president has no role in the electoral certification. Indeed under the “safe harbor” provision, 3 U.S.C. § 5, once a state certifies its electors and transmits them to the archivist those certifications “shall be treated as conclusive in Congress with respect to the determination of electors appointed by the state.”
The swing states had all undertaken audits and recounts, and Trump’s dozens of election lawsuits had come to naught. What Trump wanted was for Vice President Pence to pretend that his role as President of the Senate entitled him to reject the legally certified electoral certificates and accept the fraudulent ones ginned up by the Trump campaign. And, barring that, Trump wanted his supporters to stop the vote by force.
And it really is quite astonishing that Lauro is regurgitating the same lines as John Eastman, who even acknowledged in his email to Pence’s aide Greg Jacob during the attack that what he was asking for was not legal:
So now that the precedent has been set that the Electoral Count Act is not quite so sacrosanct as was previously claimed, I implore you to consider one more relatively minor violation and adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations, as well as to allow a full forensic audit of the massive amount of illegal activity that has occurred here.
Lauro, who consistently referred to Trump as the president, while inveighing against “Joe Biden and his Justice Department,” decried what he described as a “coordinated effort, a collusive effort” to “tie [Trump] up in knots in the middle of a campaign that he’s leading in.”
“You know, if I appear in court, I’m going to representing not on the President of the United States, but the sovereign citizens of this country who deserve to hear the truth,” he blustered, with absolutely zero pushback from his Fox hosts.
The only resistance came from host John Roberts when Lauro declared that he was going to put the whole trial on television — or at least demand to run the thing on Pay-Per-View and dare the DOJ to block him.
LAURO: The first thing we would ask for is let’s have cameras in the courtroom so all Americans can see what’s happening in our criminal justice system. And I would hope the Department of Justice would join in that effort. So that we take the curtain away, and all Americans can get to see what’s happening. This is unprecedented to threaten a president.
ROBERTS: You might want to have that discussion with Donald Trump, because he’s the one who didn’t want cameras in the courtroom when he was indicted in New York, so…
LAURO: That’s different. We’re going to have a process.
ROBERTS: You also can’t have cameras in federal courts.
LAURO: You can ask for it.
ROBERTS: You can ask for it. You’re not going to get ’em.
Let’s go out on a limb and assume that the federal court in DC is not about to allow video cameras in its courtroom. Although, if it did, we’d pay big bucks to watch Lauro make these nonsensical arguments in front of a US District judge.
Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.