Former senior prosecutor to special counsel Robert Mueller, Andrew Weissmann, pointed to a piece of Donald Trump’s recent interview on “Meet the Press” that isn’t getting as much attention as his claim that he wasn’t listening to his lawyers after all.
Weissmann highlighted Trump’s admission that he “knew by 10 o’clock the night of the election” that it was over. He then looked back at Trump’s actions at 10 p.m. on Nov. 3, 2020.
“That was something that’s got very little attention, and that was something of an effort to stop the count of votes,” Weissmann said. “And the president and his allies had talked about this before the election, and then tried to put it into effect on the night of the election. They knew there would be this thing called the ‘red mirage,’ you may remember this Lawrence.”
Weissmann explained that the way the vote count works is that many states don’t begin counting the mail-in votes prior to the election. So, the in-person votes, which are predominantly Republican, will often appear first. The mail-in ballots take longer to open, process and count.
“So, he went out and tried to get states to stop counting votes,” Weissmann said. “That feeds into two of the three charges, like a hand in the glove — which is obstruction and the 241 Civil Rights violation. Because you can’t do that. You can’t not count American votes. And that was really interesting to me that he was going back to that in this interview, this sort of ‘stop the count.’ Because that is part of the charges in both Georgia and in D.C.”
Former federal prosecutor and University of Alabama Law professor Joyce Vance explained that these kinds of admissions of guilt can end up in court proceedings, even if Trump doesn’t take the stand.
“They could play some of these videotapes,” she said. “And you could imagine how powerful this would be. I think Mar-a-Lago is a great example where you might, for instance, have people talking about the briefings, the former president received on classified information and its handling. The prosecution could show the jury the documents, and they could look at this incredible video of Trump talking about how cavalierly he handled it, because it was his and he could do whatever he wanted to do with it. It would be a very powerful presentation in mind.”
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