A former prosecutor knocked a Donald Trump defense attorney for what he deemed “not a smart move” and an “admission” on live TV related to the former’s president’s Jan. 6 charges.
Trump attorney John Lauro went on both Fox News and Newsmax to claim the then-president called on then-Vice President Mike Pence to bring Electoral College voting to a “halt” and let state legislatures “take one last look” before the count was certified.
“He desperately wanted to get to what happened during the 2020 cycle … He asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for 10 days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or reaudit or recertify,” Lauro said on Newsmax Thursday.
“But what he didn’t do is, you know, send in the tanks, tell Mr. Pence don’t go to Capitol Hill or do anything to obstruct the due process of government.”
Lauro made similar comments on Fox News, which former Justice Department prosecutor Andrew Weissmann characterized on MSNBC as an admission and not a defense.
“A defense lawyer who makes a statement on behalf of their client — that is an admission,” Weissmann, an MSNBC contributor, told host Lawrence O’Donnell.
“Not that Donald Trump is going to testify, but if he were and he didn’t say exactly this thing, he can be cross-examined on this,” Weissmann continued. “So this was just a kind of rookie mistake to make … This was not a smart move.”
The indictment in special counsel Jack Smith’s 2020 election probe alleges that Trump held a meeting with Pence — along with a co-conspirator believed to be lawyer John Eastman — two days before the Capitol insurrection to convince Pence “based on the Defendant’s knowingly false claims of election fraud” that he should “reject or send to the states Biden’s legitimate electoral votes, rather than count them.”
Hours after Trump’s rioting mob was dispersed, the person believed to be Eastman is described as emailing Pence’s counsel to implore him to consider “one more relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act and “adjourn for 10 days to allow the legislatures to finish their investigations.”
O’Donnell declared that the Fox News clip shows Lauro “quoting Donald Trump committing a crime.” He noted that the indictment describes the Trump-Pence meeting as a criminal conspiracy and said Lauro blurted the “words from Donald Trump’s mouth.”
Watch more of O’Donnell’s show below.