Trump Reportedly Getting Ready to Throw Giuliani and John Eastman Under the Bus
AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin, File
It’s possible that a third indictment is coming for former President Donald Trump for his involvement in January 6, and one legal strategy being hinted at is blaming the lawyers who advised him at the time.
Trump has claimed in his Truth Social posts that he “did nothing wrong” when the January 6 insurrection happened and he allegedly tried to steal the 2020 election, and that he was “advised by many lawyers” at the time. In a new Rolling Stone report by Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley those lawyers could very well turn out to be the scapegoats, specifically John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani:
The attorneys were acting on Trump’s behalf. But in this legal strategy, Team Trump would argue it was the lawyers leading Trump, rather than the other way around.
“It is an argument the [former] president likes, and the team is on board with it,” one Trump adviser bluntly says, then somewhat ominously adding: “John [Eastman] and Rudy [Giuliani] gave a lot of counsel … Other people can decide how sound it was.”
Judging by the testimony given by both Giuliani and Eastman, they knew that the advice they were giving was short of “sound.” In late July, Giuliani admitted in a court filing that statements he made publicly and repeatedly about Georgia election workers allegedly committing fraud were false. And when Eastman testified before the January 6 Committee in June 2022, he admitted that despite knowing that using former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the 2020 election was illegal, he pushed for it anyway. Eastman even emailed Giuliani requesting that he “should be on the [presidential] pardon list, if that is still in the works.”
But placing blame on “advice of counsel” might not be enough because Trump listens to many other people besides his lawyers, including people who aren’t lawyers at all. Tim Parlatore, one of Trump’s former lawyers who quit this past May, told Rolling Stone how weak that defense could be:
“To my mind, ‘advice of counsel’ is a much more narrow defense, whereas a more comprehensive view of everything that went into Trump’s state of mind, and would affect the mens rea element of it, is more effective. This would include all of the advice and the information that he received and was basing his decision on — not just the advice from the attorneys who were formally representing him.”
But even with Trump placing the blame on others, that defense could backfire if he’s found to have committed a crime:
“[The ‘advice of counsel’ argument] has its limits. As a lawyer, I can’t tell my client: Look, there’s this obscure, ancient law that I found that says you can kill your wife. If the client goes out and kills his wife, it doesn’t really work if the client turns around and says, ‘Well, wait, my lawyer told me I could do that,'” says Steven Groves, who used to work as an attorney and then as a spokesman in the Trump White House.
It wouldn’t be the first time Trump tried to pass the buck on January 6. As Suebsaeng and Rawnsley point out, former chief of staff Mark Meadows was once considered a Trump target:
As congressional investigators on the Jan. 6 committee scrutinized Meadows last summer, Trump pointedly told associates that he wasn’t always aware of his chief of staff’s activities in the run up to the deadly Capitol assault.
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