“The evidence is so overwhelming”: Legal expert warns Trump that his defense “is not going to work”

Former President Donald Trump added a new attorney ahead of a possible federal indictment over his role in the deadly Jan. 6 Capitol riots and efforts to overturn the 2020 election after receiving a target letter from special counsel Jack Smith.

Trump last week added attorney John Lauro, who previously represented Trump attorneys Christina Bobb and Alina Habba.

CNN legal analyst Norm Eisen, who served as Democratic counsel during Trump’s first impeachment, told CNN that Lauro is a “very skilled” and “very brilliant defense lawyer” but predicted that he was taking on a losing case.

“It’s not going to work because I believe the evidence is so overwhelming here. When this case gets to a jury, Donald Trump is going to be in a lot of trouble. But he does have a good defense lawyer on his side now in John,” Eisen said on Sunday.

Though Lauro has claimed that Trump did nothing illegal, Eisen listed off several potential offenses he may be charged with, particularly in connection with the fake elector scheme.

“Those phony false, fraudulent counterfeit certificates!” he said. “These were pieces of paper that said the undersigned were the electors for the winner, Donald Trump. And they signed these false electors signed that. That’s a counterfeit. 18 USC 1871. That was led from the Oval Office, conspiracy to defraud.”

Former FBI assistant director for counterintelligence Frank Figliuzzi argued that Smith’s election probe is decidedly different from Trump’s other charges. During a Sunday sit-down on MSNBC, Figliuzzi was asked if, “the 2020 election is different since it involves a former president who tried to interfere with the peaceful transition of power.”

“Of all the cases and charges that Trump is facing so far, and I in no way mean to denigrate them. In fact, I am incensed about the documents case, I dealt with classified information for the bulk of my career and that’s serious. But this one, this one is different because it goes to the heart of our democratic process a free and fair election and having our vote count,” Figliuzzi said. 

“This is a civil rights charge,” he added. “While it’s going to be uniquely applied in this set of circumstances, this charge was enacted, way back when, to enable agents and prosecutors to go into the deep south [and] work against the Ku Klux Klan, who was preventing minorities from voting.”

“This charge is right and it goes to the heart of whether we are going to continue as a democracy to have our votes count. This one’s different. It counts, it means everything moving forward as a democracy,” Figliuzzi continued. 

Former acting Solicitor General Neal Katyal told MSNBC that the target letter offers a “pretty good clue” that Trump will be indicted imminently. 

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“A target letter is not something that is required to be sent to every potential target, and you certainly don’t need to list every conceivable charge that you’re thinking about as a prosecutor when you send someone a target letter. But it’s a pretty good clue,” Katyal said.

“We’re talking here about federal charges,” he added. “We’re talking about what Jack Smith, the special counsel, is going to bring on behalf of the United States Justice Department. There’s also a separate set of investigations going on in Georgia and perhaps other states about Trump’s fraud around January 6th, the fake electors’ plot, and stuff like that. So you could see Trump facing, for the same basic conduct, trials going on in Georgia at the state level and with Jack Smith at the federal level, conceivably in Washington, DC. I think the bottom line here is I think it’s quite clear that Donald Trump is going to double his current number of indictments in the near future.”