Trump attorney John Lauro proves once again he's very bad at his job. Lauro should do Trump a favor and get off of television, but instead he keeps admitting to Trump's crimes over and over again, and he did it at least twice during interviews this Sunday.
During a somewhat contentious interview on CNN's State of the Union, host Dana Bash went round and round with Lauro, who continued to insist that Trump had every right to ask Pence and others to overturn the election, calling it a matter of "free speech" and that somehow "asking" Pence not to certify the election is not the same thing as "directing" him to do it.
Lauro asserted that somehow Trump couldn't have committed a crime because ultimately Mike Pence didn't listen to him and certified the election, and when he made this lame attempt to normalize the coup attempt, claiming that there was a "peaceful transfer of power," Bash hit back:
With Lauro asserting there was a "peaceful transfer of power," the CNN host shot back, " What happened on January 6th was not peaceful."
She then continued, "I want to ask you something about John Eastman, because you talked a lot about how he's a respected constitutional attorney."
"The transfer of power was certainly peaceful," Lauro interrupted.
"Did you see what happened on January 6th? Did that look peaceful to you?" Bash pressed
"I'm not saying that that was in any way appropriate," the attorney stuttered. "But the ultimate power of the presidency was transferred to Mr. Biden. We all know that, as you do."
What we witnessed Lauro doing here is normalizing a coup attempt. It's too bad Bash didn't mention the fact that Eastman basically admitted as much in a recent interview which was summed up nicely by TPM's Josh Marshall:
January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.
[...]
From the beginning the Trump/Eastman coup plotters have tried to wrap their efforts in legal processes and procedures. It was their dissimulating shield to hide the reality of their coup plot and if needed give them legal immunity from the consequences. The leaders of the secession movement tried the same thing in 1861.
In a way I admire Eastman for coming clean. I don’t know whether he sees the writing on the wall and figures he might as well lay his argument out there or whether his grad school political theory pretensions and pride got the better of him and led him to state openly this indefensible truth. Either way he’s done it and not in any way that’s retrievable as a slip of the tongue. They knew it was a coup and they justified it to themselves in those terms. He just told us. They believed they were justified in trying to overthrow the government, whether because of OSHA chair size regulations or drag queens or, more broadly, because the common herd of us don’t understand the country’s “founding principles” the way Eastman and his weirdo clique do. But they did it. He just admitted it. And now they’re going to face the consequences.
