Trump requires an extraordinary amount of legal help
Politico this morning purports to catalog the lawyers Donald Trump keeps around for throwing at his endless string of legal problems. “Now they’re representing a former president caught in a mixture of criminal matters related to the 2020 election, his retention of documents marked highly classified, alongside a wide range of civil lawsuits.”
Politico lists five attorneys just on Trump’s stolen documents investigation. Two more are defending Trump in the New York attorney general’s investigation of Trump tax fraud.
Three others are assigned to defending Trump in the Fulton County, Georgia district attorney’s investigation into Trump’s attempt to strongarm state election officials into overturning the 2020 election results.
Three more (plus one from the first batch) are defending Trump in the investigation into Trump’s Jan. 6 fake electors scheme.
Yet another three lawyers are fighting the House Ways and Means Committee’s attempts to obtain Trump’s tax returns in the investigation into Trump’s finances.
Still four more are involved in Trump’s lawsuit against Hillary Clinton over “a collection of his long-held grievances against Democrats and federal investigators.”
Finally, Trump faces “a barrage of lawsuits — from Capitol Police officers and members of Congress — seeking damages.” And he is pushing back against a letter by “former U.S. intelligence and national security officials” who assessed that the emails from Hunter Biden’s laptop bear “all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” Team Trump considers the Steele dossier a Russian fake because it makes Trump look bad. But Team Trump argues that the Hunter Biden emails are authentic because they make Joe Biden look bad. Chalk up two more attorneys, one for each of those matters.
That’s a lot of lawyers.
Readers of this blog might recall at least one more attorney Trump keeps around for harrassing people who call into question The Donald’s liquidity. There are surely more.
Don’t be so gullible, McFly!
It is a time-tested tactic on the right. Practiced and perfected. Gin up fake controversy over anything and everything. From tan suits to sloppy salutes. From Benghazi to emails. Pimp it like hell until the press can’t stop itself from reporting the controversy. Rush Limbaugh built a career on serving up a daily dose of outrage to his listeners until they would go into withdrawal if it stopped. I’ve described the decades-long, Republican phony effort to convince the public there is massive voter fraud as them lobbing smoke bombs into newsrooms. By the time the smoke clears and we discover, yet again, there was never a fire, all the public remembers is they saw smoke and heard someone yelling, “Fire!” Lather, rinse, repeat.
Digby calls it the “where there’s smoke there’s fire” gambit.
The press continues to fall for it. Willingly now. There are 24 hours of news to fill. The audience for it is over 50, as CNN has lately discovered. The right has worked the refs so hard that the press shies from being accused of left-wing bias if it ignores the right-wing bullshit. So the press settles on “We report the smoke. You decide if there’s fire.” Normal people default to fire. Republicans know and use this.
Except MAGA Republicans. Perpetual victims, they are, and their political patron saint.
With all those lawyers circling around Trump, normal people would decide that where Trump is there too is illegal activity. The kind that would make someone unfit to lead a great nation, even a “great again” nation. Only the gullible would dismiss all those legal filings and civil and criminal cases Trump attracts, and the judgments against him, as bullshit witch hunts.
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