Trump lawyer Joe Tacopina is doing his job here. Not well, especially the lame answer to the question about all the “Democrats” he says oppose Donald’s indictment in the Stormy Daniels case, but he’s doing it. He’s defending his client on TV (and presumably will be doing it in a courtroom starting on Tuesday). When George Stephanopoulos next asks him how does he know the charges are bogus, especially considering that there are as many as 30 of them (another report says roughly 24 charges), Tacopina does his best to make it sound excessive and frivolous, saying “they can extrapolate counts and make one thing into five counts,” that each individual payment is a count of a falsified business record. Tacopina rambles but the point he’s trying to make comes across enough.
And he may very well be right. We don’t know what’s in the indictment at this point and while this is obviously pretty much the most favorable possible guess he could be making to explain the high volume of counts, it’s a relatively educated and circumspect one. It’s also still a guess.
That’s way more than we can say about Trump’s “defenders” elsewhere, who have been down this road before and not that long ago. It’s hard to look at the known unknowns around this indictment and not think of one hilarious incident in the immediate aftermath of the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago last August. Three days later the House Freedom Caucasians were planning to hold a news conference at the Capitol the next morning to take turns screaming into the microphone about how it was a witch hunt and the documents weren’t that big of a deal and all the usual hateful shit.
Then the Washington Post reported that the documents their Orange God Emperor stole contained classified nuclear weapons intel. Rather than recalibrating, the Freedom Caucus abruptly canceled the presser. Some other Republicans quickly slapped together another one, which didn’t go great.
With the Mar-a-Lago docs case, it takes a few sentences to explain the gravity of the other classified info involved. “SCI [Secret Compartmented Information] control system designed to protect intelligence information derived from clandestine human sources” – documents of a nature Trump also stole – just comes across as a bureaucratic abstraction to someone only half listening in the first place. Not “Nuclear” though. It’s a blunt, frightening word, and the Freedom Caucasians were right to piss their pants in panic and hide from the press that morning, leaving that less-Trumpy schmuck Mike Turner to go out there to try explain why maybe it’s not that bad.
No sense framing this like a rhetorical question, so might as well just say it outright: MAGA Republicans in Congress and right wing media influencers didn’t learn their lesson that time and this time they’re doing it again by rolling the dice on these charges just being multiple counts stemming from hush money paid to Stormy Daniels and (maybe) Karen McDougal during the 2016 campaign.
There are two tiers of justice in America.
Trump is being indicted on petty charges.
Hillary Clinton committed the same “offense” in the same city – but with 10x more money involved.
Brazen partisanship on behalf of Alvin Bragg. pic.twitter.com/QN5zgdji4C
— Senator Ted Cruz (@SenTedCruz) March 31, 2023
Again, Tacopina could be correct about that “extrapolation” (not sure if that’s a proper usage of the word). It could be that the number of charges is being grossly oversold – we’ve got conflicting reports which increases the chances that both of them is wrong and there could be less than 10 counts. If it’s just Stormy and McDougal then MAGA world at least has the benefit of both being “old news” that the public and media have already long ago absorbed despite the insanely convoluted and conflicting assertions of how it was all “totally cool and totally legal.”
But the grand jury investigated this for two months. In two months we have reports of five witnesses connected to the scandal going in and out of the building to talk to prosecutors and/or testify to the grand jury – Michael Cohen, Kellyanne Conway, Hope Hicks, Stormy Daniels, and David Pecker. We can’t be totally certain about this, but there’s a solid chance that we only know they were there to talk to prosecutors and/or the grand jury about Trump’s Stormy-McDougal hush money investigation because a reporter spotted them in or near the building and asked what they were up to – which is to say there might have been people there for similar reasons that reporters did not recognize.
How about Trump’s doorman and housekeeper? Do NYC court beat reporters know what they look like? Are Republicans really fucking 100% sure that it’s just the two women and that Trump has given them all the facts with which they’re supposed to be armed with before they go on Fox News and call this a “witch hunt” and an affront to “election integrity” and all that shit?
They’re walking into Tuesday completely blind. They better fucking pray they don’t need to spin anything else, particularly anything less defensible than banging a pornstar and a Playboy model the same year his wife had just given birth to their son and then paying them to keep quiet.
Because it was too much to ask of them to simply say something realtively normal like Republican former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson did on Saturday. “Well, a prosecutor has discretion. And in this case – and I’m saying that based upon the facts that I know – you have something that’s never been done before. And so it looks like it’s very thin. And when you’re going after the former president of the United States of America, you better have a rock-solid case. Now, we need to be a little patient on the facts because he hasn’t – the district attorney, Bragg, has not released the indictment yet, so we don’t know the details. But based on what I know, it doesn’t look like a case that I would have brought or should be brought against the former president,” Hutchinson told NPR.