Joining us now, Gene Rossi,
former assistant U.S.
attorney for the Eastern District
of Virginia.
Thank you, sir, for being here.
I want to start with what we heard
from Donald Trump.
Everybody's talking about it.
He says he doesn't respect the attorneys
that were telling him he lost
and that it was his decision
to go forward with this idea
that the 2020 election was stolen.
If you were prosecuting this case,
how do you use those comments
and will they hurt him and his defense?
Well, number one, I would use them
if I were a prosecutor
in my case in chief.
Number two, they do hurt him.
And here's why.
Sara,
when you are
putting forth
a reliance on counsel, defense
whether it's a criminal tax case
or statute
that involves willfulness,
and you are talking to your lawyers
about whether a statute applies to you
or whether your conduct is appropriate.
You can rely on counsel.
And that is a an excellent defense
in front of a jury
at least could get one juror
and say not guilty.
But what Mr.
Trump did yesterday in that interview
is he didn't just shoot one
and then shoot one fourth.
He should shot both feet.
He just destroyed any argument
that he could say.
I relied on attorneys, what he was doing.
This is what I would argue
as a prosecutor.
He was for shopping.
He was trying to find the attorney
that would agree
with his perverted view of the big lie
And you had Attorney
General Barr said no fraud.
You had rose in the acting A.G.
know from John you,
the deputy attorney general,
all these brilliant guys saying
there's nothing there, Mr. President.
And he was looking for.
I hate to say it,
he was looking for the sycophant,
Jeffrey Clarke,
who desperately wanted
to be acting attorney general
in the last
ten days of the administration.
Yeah. It's really interesting,
the way that you put it, that he
he shot himself, in your view,
and in both feet
I want to move on to another case
that we are seeing play out
in court today in Georgia.
Former Trump White House
chief of Staff
Mark Meadows lost his case
in the same vein.
To try to get his trial in Georgia
moved to federal court.
Now, Jeffrey
Clarke is trying to do the same thing.
Can we just make the assumption
that there's
going to be
the similar result
where the judge will say
no, this has to stay in state court
or is this different?
Will the judge
look at all of the facts of that
case and decide differently
Sir, to me,
Jeffrey Clarke's argument is worse.
Mark Meadows had some argument
a little bit, not a lot.
But what Jeffrey
Clarke did was way beyond his role
as acting attorney general,
the civil division
I worked at named Justice.
They have attorney
assistant attorney generals
like cardinals in the papacy.
They are big fishes.
He was an acting attorney general
for the civil division.
Stay in your lane.
Do you can't go riding letters
to state officials
about something that isn't occurring.
And here's what really offends me, sir.
The first paragraph of this letter
that they wanted
to send to Governor Kemp,
the speaker of the House
and the Senate pro tempore of the Senate.
It starts off with a big lie.
And the big lie is this.
The DOJ is investigated in Florida fraud.
That was a total, complete,
fabricated law.
And the other thing in the letter is
the letter says that the states
have plenary full, complete
rule over elections.
Why is the DOJ
putting their fingers in the pot
that's outside your lane?
Mr.
Clarke,
you were not protected
by the supremacy clause.
Let's bring into the table CNN
political commentator, former White House
communications director Lisa Fair.
Griffin, CNN senior political analyst
and anchor
John Avlon,
and CNN political commentator
and New York magazine
columnist Errol Louis.
Guys, welcome. Thank you for being here.
I want to dig in on the abortion piece
and where that stands in the debate in a minute.
But but I want to start
when it comes to Trump's interview
with the fact
that he's been indicted four times.
He tried to overturn an election
and we're having a policy debate,
which is a good debate
to consider and weigh.
And it's what Republican
voters, particularly,
as Jeff
points out in Iowa,
do actually care about.
But he's 60 points right now.
Well, exactly. It's absolute crazy town.
I mean, in that interview alone,
I thought Kristen
Welker did a fantastic job.
But I mean,
he incriminated himself again.
He took responsibility for saying that.
It was my idea.
Actually, I want to play.
That's a great point.
We play that sound rhetoric
the most senior lawyers in
your own administration
and on your campaign
told you that
after you lost
more than 60 legal challenges
that it was over
Why did you ignore them and decide
to listen to a new outside group?
Because I didn't respect them.
Were you calling the shots, though, Mr.
President, ultimately,
as to
whether or not I believed it was rigged?
Sure, I it was my decision.
But I listened to some people.
Some people said that.
I mean, it's insane
that in the year of our Lord 20, 23,
we're still debating this.
And he is, as you mentioned, Phil,
you know, ten, 20, 40 points in Iowa
ahead of his GOP rivals
as the man who tried
to overturn our democracy
And by the way,
I mean, a lot of the polls show
I'm kind of head to head with Joe Biden.
If he loses,
what's to say he won't do it again.
And if he wins,
that's a whole other Pandora's
box of problems for our country.
Carol. It also complicates the defense efforts.
I mean, all
his attorneys
were coming on the air
after this indictment saying
there's nothing wrong
with following
the advice of legal counsel.
That's right.
In fact, it's
a pretty good defense, actually.
But if you
if you throw it away
on national television,
that is no longer available to you
or at a minimum,
you're setting yourself up
for a very uncomfortable
cross-examination.
And these criminal charges say
he would testify at a Christian.
That's who he said he would testify.
He will have a
like I said, a very difficult
cross-examination.
He also sort of just like ladle,
you know, layered,
you know, one statement
on top of another
saying that
he might have pardoned himself,
he might pardon himself in the future.
He might pardon
half the people who got convicted
on January 6th
for them for those violations.
He really sort of put front and center
an issue
that, believe me, Donald Trump
does not want the conduct of his attacks
on democracy to become a central issue.
In this in this next election.
He's not going to win that debate.
And yet that is the debate.
That is the conversation
that we should be having.
And look, let's not forget,
it was in the Trump White House
and she's one of
dozens and dozens
ringing this alarm bell
for some time,
warning the American people
in the Republican Party
that this man represents
a threat to the republic.
Most recent person on that bandwagon
apparently is Jenny
Ellison's former lawyer
who was pushing these laws.
Now we're calling him
a malignant narcissist. Yeah.
So, again,
you know, go with people who know you best
but know this interview was a disaster.
From a legal standpoint, clearly,
and could represent a possible rupture.
And quickly,
it does show the tension you run into
when you're running for office,
but also running against
four different indictments
so he's, you know, wants to be on air.
He wants to be talking to the public
and doing interviews.
But then he runs into saying things
that self-incrimination
that put his legal cases backward.
But it's also I feel like this is
that was actually the best capture
of this entire campaign season.
Of the other candidates
running in this race,
having policy debates,
acting like the other stuff
related to the former president,
who's leading the primary by 50 points
doesn't exist right
like it's 2012
all over again or early 2015 and Trump
coming out and doing what he did
I mean talking about conspiracy theories
related to the election.
It's just the same person he's on
and also realistic on the abortion issue
which at the end of the day
Iowa voters are going to say,
Donald Trump got me Gorsuch.
Amy Coney Barrett and Brett Kavanaugh,
he's sufficiently pro-life.
He played the biggest role
in getting Roe overturned.
So they can argue about weeks
that will not break through.
The reason that people are losing by
40 points to Donald Trump is
they did not litigate
the case of his unfitness
and the fact that he basically tried
to overthrow our republic.
You're not breaking
through on a policy matter at this time
or what,
four months
from the Iowa caucuses, five months
from New Hampshire.
That's not fundamentally changing
at this point.
It's never historically happened,
I should say.