Oh boy this is weird

| 8:00 pm EST January 22, 2020
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

Donald Trump’s impeachment trial lawyer Jay Sekulow has been with him for a long time, but he hasn’t been heard from all that frequently. That’s probably because he’s absolutely terrible at all of this. He’s best known for going on Fox News a couple years ago and talking himself into such a self-contradictory corner, a visibly stunned Chris Wallace could only bring himself to say “Oh boy this is weird.”

Considering that Donald Trump can’t find anyone with even a smidgeon of respectability to be on his impeachment trial defense team (Dershowitz, Starr and Bondi are what’s beneath the bottom of the barrel), it perhaps shouldn’t be surprising that Trump is resorting to sending Jay Sekulow out there as part of the team, despite his incompetence. It wasn’t surprising either that when the House managers said something about FOIA lawsuits, Sekulow thought they said “lawyer lawsuits” and went off the deep end accordingly.

Even if Sekulow didn’t fully hear the phrase clearly, “FOIA lawsuits” is still the first place that any politically astute person’s mind would go, within the context of making evidence against Trump public. For Sekulow’s mind to skip over “FOIA lawsuits” and go straight to “lawyer lawsuits,” it suggests that he has less familiarity with what’s going on here than the average politically astute viewer watching at home.

What’s fascinating is that the Trump White House is now insisting Jay Sekulow didn’t hear it wrong, and that the House managers really did say “lawyer lawsuits.” Daily Kos is pointing out that the Trump regime is going as far as referring to an imaginary transcript. Of course these are the kinds of nonsense battles that Donald Trump cares about. His narcissism won’t allow his people to admit that his lawyer heard something wrong, or even to just quietly let the whole thing go. This is not, as they say, a winning strategy.