Donald Trump just made Jack Smith’s job a whole lot easier with his new Bret Baier interview on Fox News
When you’re criminally indicted and you’re obviously guilty and obviously nailed, any competent defense attorney will give you the same advice: shut up. Your only slim hope of getting off the hook is to try to carve out some incredibly narrow reasonable doubt argument at trial, and hope the jury is dumb enough to fall for it.
Unfortunately for Donald Trump, and fortunately for the rest of us, he’s been unable to follow this advice. He keeps running his mouth on his social network in ways that only serve to help weaken the various reasonable doubt arguments that might be available to him at trial. And now Trump has appeared on Fox News with host Bret Baier today, doing even more damage to himself.
At one point in the interview, Trump claimed that NARA should have begged him to return the documents. At another point Trump claimed that he didn’t turn over the classified documents because he wanted to go through the boxes and remove his personal items from them. Well which is it? He kept the boxes spitefully because they should have begged him, or he lazily kept them because he couldn’t be bothered to go through and remove his personal items? The whole interview went roughly like this. Trump dealt himself one blow after another.
Trump’s interview today closes off a whole number of reasonable doubt arguments for Trump, because he’s trying to invoke them all in the same conversation, even though they conflict with each other. Jack Smith and his team are surely rewinding this interview as we speak, and pinning down all the holes that Trump just poked in his own defense.
No wonder two of Donald Trump’s attorneys in this case quit the minute the indictment text was made public. It was easy to see then that Trump’s inability to shut his mouth had already doomed him, and was going to keep dooming him further. Trump is still treating this as if it were a reality show, when it is in fact a criminal trial that will send him to prison for the rest of his life. At this point Trump might as well be working for the prosecution. Trump’s mouth is becoming Jack Smith’s best asset.
