How stupid is Trump?

Everyone is well aware of the FBI investigation and the decision not to charge her for violating the Classified Information Nondisclosure Agreement.

Indeed. Clearly biased.

Trump Lawyers Are Preparing Defense For Likely Criminal Charges
https://crooksandliars.com/2022/08/trump-lawyers-are-preparing-defense-2

Trump Lawyers Are Preparing Defense For Likely Criminal Charges
Trump’s team has discussed strategies that involve shifting blame from Trump to his advisors for the efforts to overturn the election.
By Susie Madrak — August 1, 2022


Trump’s lawyers are preparing a legal defense against possible criminal charges from the Justice Department, reportedly anxious that he will be prosecuted for his role in the attempt to overturn the 2020 election. Via Rolling Stone:

Members of the ex-president’s legal team have already begun brainstorming strategy and potential defenses, according to three people familiar with the matter and written communications reviewed by Rolling Stone. Trump himself has been briefed on potential legal defenses on at least two occasions this summer, two of the sources say.

That effort intensified after former Trump White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson’s June testimony before the House committee investigating Jan. 6.

“Members of the Trump legal team are quietly preparing, in the event charges are brought,” says one person familiar with the situation. “It would be career malpractice not to. Do the [former] president’s attorneys believe everything Cassidy said? No … Do they think the Department of Justice would be wise to charge him? No. But we’ve gotten to a point where if you don’t think criminal charges are at least somewhat likely, you are not serving the [former] president’s best interests.”


Strategies under discussion? Blame someone else. Sounds like they'd try to pin it all on Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman:

In their preparations, Trump’s team has discussed strategies that involve shifting blame from Trump to his advisors for the efforts to overturn the election, per the three sources, reflecting a broader push to find a fall fall-guy — or fall-guys. “Trump got some terrible advice from attorneys who, some people would argue, should have or must have known better,” says one of the sources with knowledge of recent discussions in Trumpland. “An ‘advice of counsel’ defense would be a big one.”


Oh, and his legal team knows they're going to need a big name if he's charged:

If the Justice Department does come with charges, Trump’s current team has acknowledged they would have to bring on more legal firepower to handle the historic legal defense. “You’d need to have a real heavyweight at the top [of the legal team] for something like that, but right now nobody knows who that would be,” one Trump adviser says.


I hear Alan Dershowitz is moping around Martha's Vineyard with nothing to do...

If I were advising Trump's legal team...I would advise them to figure out a way to insure they will get paid.

Frank Apisa wrote:

If I were advising Trump's legal team...I would advise them to figure out a way to insure they will get paid.

Ha! Spot on! I would never be on his legal team but you're right - anyone who is should ask for a very hefty retainer and then do as little work as possible.

I’m thinking some of them would look at the big publicity as sort of an indirect way to cash in.

We are lucky- t-rump is so stupid combined with being such a column! .......

Trump is not going to be happy to hear about this, and that honestly thrills me.

According to a report from Tommy Christopher at Mediaite, former presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush were told about the strike on Ayman Al-Zawahiri by the Biden administration before the general public knew…but another former president*, Donald Trump, was not. (Trump will always have an asterisk by his name as far as I am concerned…he wasn’t a true president, fight me.)

At Tuesday’s White House briefing, John Kirby attended alongside Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre to answer any questions about the strike on Al-Zawahiri that happened over the prior weekend.

But as pointed out by Mediaite’s Christopher, one question from the Washington Post’s White House Tyler Pager went unanswered: (Transcript courtesy of Mediaite)

MR. PAGER: John, just a quick question. Did the President alert former President Obama or Bush or Trump be- — after the strike, before he informed the public? President Obama did so when the U.S. killed Osama bin Laden. I’m wondering if there’s any communication between the current President and his predecessors in the last (inaudible)?

MR. KIRBY: You know, Tyler, I don’t have — I — I’d have to go back and check. I don’t know if there was outreach to former Commanders-in-Chief after the fact. There was no notifications to anybody before the act — before the strike.

Pager noted how then-President Obama called former President Bush and described the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in detail:

“Bush said he was eating souffles at a Dallas restaurant with his wife, Laura, and two friends when he got word that Obama, his successor as president, was trying to reach him.

“I excused myself and went home to take the call,” Bush said. “Obama simply said, ‘Osama bin Laden is dead.’”

After Obama described in detail the secret U.S. raid on Osama’s compound in Pakistan and the decision he made to go ahead with the mission, Bush said he told Obama: “Good call.”

And according to an exclusive from Mediaite, they can report that similar calls were made by the Biden administration following the Al-Zawahiri strike, to Presidents Obama and Bush — but not to Trump.

A National Security Council spokesperson told Mediaite that “The Biden Administration spoke to Presidents Bush and Obama to notify them about the strike before it was announced publicly.”

And it makes perfect sense. Trump can’t be trusted. Come on, we can all see him hitting Truth Social and saying “Something really big happened tonight, but I can’t tell you what, and it’s not as big as what I did, but it’s still somewhat big”. We all know it. The man cannot be trusted. PERIOD. Trump took classified documents from the White House when he left! The man just can’t be trusted. Plus, he refused to concede the election, and broke the tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. Therefore, he doesn’t deserve the respect that comes along with being a former president.

SAD!

WASHINGTON — Former President Donald J. Trump told his top White House aide that he wished he had generals like the ones who had reported to Adolf Hitler, saying they were “totally loyal” to the leader of the Nazi regime, according to a forthcoming book about the 45th president.

“Why can’t you be like the German generals?” Mr. Trump told John Kelly, his chief of staff, preceding the question with an obscenity, according to an excerpt from “The Divider: Trump in the White House,” by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, published online by The New Yorker on Monday morning. (Mr. Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times; Ms. Glasser is a staff writer for The New Yorker.)

The excerpt depicts Mr. Trump as deeply frustrated by his top military officials, whom he saw as insufficiently loyal or obedient to him. In the conversation with Mr. Kelly, which took place years before the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, the authors write, the chief of staff told Mr. Trump that Germany’s generals had “tried to kill Hitler three times and almost pulled it off.”

Mr. Trump was dismissive, according to the excerpt, apparently unaware of the World War II history that Mr. Kelly, a retired four-star general, knew all too well.

“‘No, no, no, they were totally loyal to him,’ the president replied,” according to the book’s authors. “In his version of history, the generals of the Third Reich had been completely subservient to Hitler; this was the model he wanted for his military. Kelly told Trump that there were no such American generals, but the president was determined to test the proposition.”

Much of the excerpt focuses on Gen. Mark A. Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the country’s top military official, under Mr. Trump. When the president offered him the job, General Milley told him, “I’ll do whatever you ask me to do.” But he quickly soured on the president.

General Milley’s frustration with the president peaked on June 1, 2020, when Black Lives Matter protesters filled Lafayette Square, near the White House. Mr. Trump demanded to send in the military to clear the protesters, but General Milley and other top aides refused. In response, Mr. Trump shouted, “You are all losers!” according to the excerpt. “Turning to Milley, Trump said, ‘Can’t you just shoot them? Just shoot them in the legs or something?’” the authors write.

After the square was cleared by the National Guard and police, General Milley briefly joined the president and other aides in walking through the empty park so Mr. Trump could be photographed in front of a church on the other side. The authors said General Milley later considered his decision to join the president to be a “misjudgment that would haunt him forever, a ‘road-to-Damascus moment,’ as he would later put it.”

A week after that incident, General Milley wrote — but never delivered — a scathing resignation letter, accusing the president he served of politicizing the military, “ruining the international order,” failing to value diversity, and embracing the tyranny, dictatorship and extremism that members of the military had sworn to fight against.

“It is my belief that you were doing great and irreparable harm to my country,” the general wrote in the letter, which has not been revealed before and was published in its entirety by The New Yorker. General Milley wrote that Mr. Trump did not honor those who had fought against fascism and the Nazis during World War II.

“It’s now obvious to me that you don’t understand that world order,” General Milley wrote. “You don’t understand what the war was all about. In fact, you subscribe to many of the principles that we fought against. And I cannot be a party to that.”

Yet General Milley eventually decided to remain in office so he could ensure that the military could serve as a bulwark against an increasingly out-of-control president, according to the authors of the book.

“‘I’ll just fight him,’” General Milley told his staff, according to the New Yorker excerpt. “The challenge, as he saw it, was to stop Trump from doing any more damage, while also acting in a way that was consistent with his obligation to carry out the orders of his commander in chief. ‘If they want to court-martial me, or put me in prison, have at it.’”

In addition to the revelations about General Milley, the book excerpt reveals new details about Mr. Trump’s interactions with his top military and national security officials, and documents dramatic efforts by the former president’s most senior aides to prevent a domestic or international crisis in the weeks after Mr. Trump lost his re-election bid.
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