Trump lawyers 'spent too much time listening to sycophants on Fox News' with 'ludicrous' arguments: expert

In poll after poll released in October, Donald Trump — despite facing four criminal indictments and a variety of civil lawsuits — has remained the clear frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary. The former president leads the second-place candidate, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, by 50 percent in a Messenger/Harris X poll released on October 24 and by 49 percent in a Morning Consult poll released the same day.

One of the four criminal prosecutions Trump is facing is special counsel Jack Smith's election interference case. Trump's lawyers have been trying to get that case thrown out in court, but progressive legal expert Elie Mystal — in an article published by The Nation on October 25 — slams their arguments as "ludicrous."

"The Trump team's main argument was that the January 6 charges should be dismissed because Trump has a First Amendment right to dispute the outcome of the 2020 election," notes Mystal, a frequent guest on MSNBC. "The lawyers argued that the real winner of the 2020 election is 'not readily verifiable or falsifiable,' meaning that the election result is not a fact — and thus, the First Amendment protects people like Trump who dispute that result. It is absolutely wrong to say that the winner of the 2020 election, President Joe Biden, is not an objective fact."

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Mystal stresses that although the U.S. Constitution's First Amendment "does protect the right of people to be wrong and grossly ignorant in public," the "thing is" that "Trump is not being charged with being wrong in public."

Mystal explains, "He's being charged with attempting to obstruct and impede an official proceeding of Congress and deny citizens their right to vote and to have their votes counted…. Trump's legal argument proceeds from the incorrect premise that he is being prosecuted for his speech. He is not. He is being prosecuted for his actions. The motion to dismiss reads like his lawyers have spent too much time listening to Trump sycophants on Fox News and not enough time reading the actual indictment filed against their client."

Trump's lawyers are also making a "double jeopardy" argument, claiming that his activities following the 2020 presidential election were already judged when he was impeached in 2021.

"I don't even have a word for how ludicrous this argument is," Mystal writes. "It's like a teenager saying they can't be prosecuted for shoplifting because 'Mommy and Daddy already grounded me.' Double jeopardy can't even be invoked when a person is prosecuted for the same crime in federal court and state court. The idea that jeopardy can be invoked after what is essentially a congressional oversight process is just inane."

READ MORE: 'A different standard of law': Expert says legal system struggling to rein in Trump

Elie Mystal's full article for The Nation is available at this link.