There was a time not long ago when we were pretty sure that “It’s not a crime for Trump to have believed these stories about a stolen election” was supposed to be only a political argument for Republicans tasked with defending him to mainstream media reporters in the hallways of the Capitol. Sure, saying “You should vote for this guy in 2024 even though he was so fucking stupid he thought Italian satellites and Chinese thermostats and a Venezuelan supercomputer built by a dictator who died a decade ago hacked into voting machines in 2020” doesn’t actually make any sense if you think about it for more than two seconds but it’s not like they have anything better.
We were thinking that was just a stopgap and at some point as the Orange God Emperor barrels toward going on trial two or three times while he’s trying to return to power that Donald’s overpaid lawyers would come up with some sort of at least sort of plausible legal defense and that would eventually percolate into the GOP’s political sound bytes. Like how fucking silly would that be if last summer’s “He really believed this stupid bullshit!” actually ended up being the legal defense?
Lol… The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reports Trump’s Georgia lawyer Steve Sadow on Monday notified the Fulton County Superior Court that he intends to move to have the sprawling RICO case against the Orange Pharaoh dismissed by arguing his stolen election fantasies were “core political speech” protected by the First Amendment, even though presiding Judge Scott McAfee already tossed that challenge from Sidney “Kraken” Powell before she flipped and pleaded guilty.
Lest you have any doubt that the vague “First Amendment” argument isn’t the same as saying Trump believed in that nonsense, Sadow further writes that “the indictment’s recitation of supposedly ‘false’ statements and facts, undisputed solely for purposes of a First Amendment-based general demurrer/motion to dismiss, show that the prosecution of President Trump is premised on content-based core political speech and expressive conduct protected by the First Amendment,” and that “‘The remedy for speech that is false is speech that is true. This is the ordinary course in a free society. The response to the unreasoned is the rational; to the uninformed the enlightened: to the straight out lie, the simple truth.’ The remedy is not a state RICO prosecution against the former President of the United States,” without elaborating on the truth remedy.
In plain English, Sadow suggests that Trump is at some point going to have to admit he now knows all that shit to be untrue. How far they’re going to go with this in both DC and Georgia is anyone’s guess, but the implications, both in and out of the courtroom, of Trump somehow walking back on his “stollen” election stories would be pretty freaking significant, to say the least.
The filing in the AJC’s article is just Sadow notifying the court of the intent to move for dismissal soon. The motion itself should be pretty fucking entertaining if it lives up that billing.
In very related news, the Guardian reported on Tuesday that Fulton DA Fani Willis does not intend to offer plea deals to Trump, Rudy, and Mark Meadows, with the last one being something of a surprise considering he’s suspected of cooperating in DC. Maybe Jack Smith and Willis are somehow working in tandem and Marky will get an offer if he’s more helpful in DC? Who knows.