Lauro got a long, mostly friendly platform on Fox News' Special Report show yesterday. Anchor Bret Baier challenged the “stolen election” claims that Fox News has paid so dearly to promote. But Baier offered no pushback to Lauro’s ludicrous claim that Trump is being prosecuted for free speech.
Right in the beginning of the latest, third criminal indictment against Trump, special counsel Jack Smith says Trump had a right to lie about the 2020 election and to challenge its results. But, as The New York Times explained, the indictment distinguished that right from Trump’s unlawfully “discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” which is what the latest indictment is about,
But Lauro not only pretended Trump was just exercising his First Amendment right to try to overturn the election but that he had the right and duty to so. Because it’s all the states’ fault.
“He was required to take steps as president of the United States to ensure that that election was held in a valid way,” Lauro said. “All of that now is being criminalized.” Claiming that Trump only had “a few weeks” to present evidence in 2020, Lauro said gleefully that the latest indictment “gives President Trump an opportunity that he has never had before, which is to have subpoena power since January 6 in a way that can be exercised in federal court.”
In other words, expect delay after delay as Trump tries to call into court one election-denying, local MAGA official after another. And you know this is all really a prelude to getting the case before coup-loving Ginni Thomas' husband at the Supreme Court.
Baier pointed out that each state had certified the election results before January 6th and has found nothing wrong since then, including Republican legislatures.
Apparently, Lauro wants to legitimize John Eastman’s “fake electors” scheme, too. “You’re missing what, what Professor Eastman’s advice was,” Lauro told Baier. “Professor Eastman said that the state legislatures had not opined and weighed in on the changes that had been done in those various states.” You have to wonder whether Lauro is also representing Eastman and any of the other five unindicted co-conspirators.
Lauro is obviously hoping to pull some Trumpy lawmakers into the case to help sabotage the 2020 results, get his treasonous client off the hook and/or re-elected so that Trump can let himself off the hook and take a bigger wrecking ball to our democracy.
All of that while Lauro poses as a defender of our democracy. “What we're going to have is not just a civil trial, but a criminal trial for Mr. Trump exercising his right to speech. So, there may be disagreement about what happened, but the bottom line is we're now treating this as a criminal case rather than as we're doing, Bret, talking about this in the context of politics and free speech.”
We all know that if Kamala Harris started talking about Trump or Republican plans to steal to 2024 election and then came up with a pretext to declare Biden the winner even if he loses, Lauro, Eastman, Fox News and the rest of MAGA world would be screaming their heads off.
