Former President Donald Trump may have committed a “technical violation of the Constitution,” but doing so doesn’t mean he broke any criminal laws, John Lauro, Trump’s criminal defense attorney, argued on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
In an interview Sunday, Lauro appeared to signal how he’d defend the former president in a trial that will stem from the four-count criminal indictment returned last week by a federal grand jury that had been examining Trump’s role in the Jan. 6 riot and efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
Pressed by NBC’s Chuck Todd on Trump’s alleged pressure campaign to get former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the election, Lauro claimed that Trump and Pence had merely engaged in a disagreement over whether a vice president could constitutionally take actions that could lead to a presidential election being overturned.
“A technical violation of the Constitution is not a violation of criminal law,” Lauro contended, calling it “just plain wrong” to suggest that Trump had pressed Pence to break the law.
“And to say that is contrary to decades of legal statutes,” he continued.
“These kinds of constitutional and statutory disagreements don’t lead to criminal charges,” Lauro argued. “And one thing that Mr. Pence has never said is that he thought President Trump was acting criminally.”
In response to the latest indictment, Pence said he believes “that anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States.” The former vice president said Wednesday that Trump surrounded himself after the 2020 election with “crackpot lawyers” who only told him what his “itching ears” wanted to hear.
“I was fully prepared to make sure that we heard all the arguments and concerns the members of Congress had brought,” Pence said. “But because of the riot and because of— because of the assertion by the president and his crackpot lawyers that I could overturn the election, the violence that ensued eclipsed all of that.”
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Further previewing his defense of Trump, Lauro argued that Trump did nothing criminal because Trump believed he’d won the 2020 election and that the charges against him were a violation of his First Amendment rights to express that opinion.
“Trump believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that election and, as any American citizen, he had a right to speak out under the First Amendment,” Lauro said.
The indictment, however, acknowledges the former president’s right under the First Amendment to “speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.” The former president was also “entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means,” the indictment says, including through recounts and lawsuits.
But it accuses Trump of going further and taking part in three criminal conspiracies: “to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit” to obstruct the electoral vote process; to “impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified;” and “against the right to vote and to have that vote counted.”
The allegation that Trump used “dishonesty, fraud, and deceit” to subvert the 2020 election with “pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud” comes after a sprawling investigation that included testimony from dozens of White House aides and advisors ranging in seniority up to Pence.
Democrats immediately pounced on Lauro’s argument.
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Md., an impeachment manager in the second impeachment trial against Trump, slammed Lauro’s argument as “deranged” and “a grievous constitutional defense,” in a separate interview on “Meet the Press” Sunday.
“First of all, a technical violation of the Constitution is a violation of the Constitution. The Constitution in six different places opposes insurrection,” Raskin said.
“Our constitution is designed to stop people from trying to overthrow elections and trying to overthrow the government,” he continued.
“He conspired to defraud the American people out of our right to an honest election by substituting the real legal process we have under federal and state law with counterfeit electors,” Raskin continued. “There are people in jail for several years for counterfeiting one vote, if they try to vote illegally once, he tried to steal the entire election.”
“That is a deranged argument,” Raskin said of Lauro’s comments.
Dareh Gregorian contributed.
Source: | This article originally belongs to Nbcnews.com
