Government

Trump's TV Lawyers Were Wilding Out Last Night

Keep talking, guys, it's totally working!

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(Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images)

Donald Trump’s lawyers had a wild night on TV yesterday after US Magistrate Judge Bruce Reinhart signaled his willingness to unseal some parts of the affidavit of probable cause to search the former president’s club and seize documents belonging to the federal government. Notably, these lawyers had nothing at all to say in court when every media outlet in the country plus conservative pressure group Judicial Watch were clamoring to shake loose the sealed document. But later when the cameras were rolling, they could not shut up!

Jenna Ellis got the ball rolling with Newsmax’s Chris Salcedo, accusing the FBI of skullduggery because agents failed to tip off the media before executing the warrant.

“The fact that the raid itself wasn’t leaked and that CNN wasn’t there with its cameras at 8 a.m. at Mar-a-Lago just shows that likely the FBI was trying to just go in under cover of darkness and get whatever it wanted under this pretext of a raid,” she said of the search which took place entirely during daylight hours. “And it’s only because President Trump is so underestimated by the left and he uses media to his advantage, he is the one that actually blew the whistle on the FBI.”

That’s funny, because just a week ago Trump’s impeachment lawyer Pam Bondi, the former Florida AG, was shouting about “agents in the water, agents in the air” and postulating that there were “hundreds of agents that had to have been weaponized to pull the assault off at Mar-a-Lago” to ensure the perfect “optics” to make Donald Trump “look like a common criminal.”

Thank God Donald Trump blew the whistle on this a sneak attack by snipers on jet skis!

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Next up was Alina Habba to explain all the things she doesn’t understand about the law to Newsmax’s Rob Schmitt. Well, not all the things — the show’s only an hour long.

“There’s three allegations, right? Concealment, espionage, and basically destruction,” she said.

Uh, no. But go on.

“All of which don’t make sense to me, knowing that he was cooperating the entire time.”

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Uh, hell no. But go on.

“If you were concealing it, you wouldn’t have allowed them in in June. If you were destructing it [sic], you wouldn’t have added the padlock that they asked you to add on in June or given them 15 boxes.”

That’s … not a legal argument. Nor does it reflect the reality that Trump held on to government property for a year and defied a subpoena for its return. But go on.

Actually don’t, because now it’s time for Rudy Giuliani to work his magic.

“They want to make him responsible for having taken classified documents and preserved them,” huffed Giuliani indignantly.

“Really if you look at the Espionage Act, it’s not really about taking the documents. It’s about destroying them, or hiding them, or giving them to the enemy. It’s not about taking them and putting them in a place that’s roughly as safe as they were in in the first place.”

Oh, never mind. Donald Trump was just making sure that government documents were safe by stashing them in a closet by the pool at his club and refusing to return them when subpoenaed. Carry on, then!

It appears to have occurred to someone in MAGAworld that Trump may not be getting the best legal representation. And that person is Fox News host Laura Ingraham, who happily stepped in to fill the void last night.

Here she is giving an impromptu lesson on “waiver” and “sleeping on your rights” to Trump’s lawyer Christina Bobb, who appears to be under the impression that Trump can intervene at some indeterminate future date if he wants the affidavit redacted in its entirety.

Here she is trying to help Bobb make the case that the documents, many of which were marked classified or top secret, were appropriately secured.

Unfortunately, Bobb’s assurances that “Mar-a-Lago is secure. Just getting on to the compound is hard. Only certain members of staff can get down there. It’s a very limited number of people that can get down there,” only succeeded in creating the Twitter meme for the evening.

Ingraham finished the show by yelling at Trump’s impeachment lawyer David Schoen, who recently rejected an offer to represent the former president in his latest legal travails.

“You gotta have a flurry of motions to respond to the full force of the federal government coming down on one man,” she declared confidently, brushing aside Schoen’s suggestion that Trump’s counsel knows what the government took and why, and if they didn’t file a motion for return of property, there’s probably a pretty good reason.

“They gotta know that the former president of the United States is taking this very seriously,” Ingraham scoffed.

We are just spitballing here, but perhaps the reason Trump’s people are keeping their heads down in court — i.e., where it actually counts — is because, after a year of negotiating with the National Archives and the Justice Department, they have a pretty good idea what’s in that affidavit. They already got burned last week by forcing the disclosure of the warrant, which showed that there was probable cause to think that there was evidence of multiple felonies at the former president’s club. And the actual evidence from that affidavit is probably going to be worse.

So maybe the wisest course of action here is to let the real lawyers work behind the scenes trying to keep their client out of jail, while subsidizing industrial-sized vats of bronzer for people willing to go on television and feed nonsense to the rubes. Or maybe Team Trump should heed the legal advice of a TV lawyer who gets paid to shout crazy stuff on television night after night. Could go either way!

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics.

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