Donald Trump’s legal team is strategizing to avoid conviction regarding the events of January 6th by placing the blame on his former attorneys, John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani, according to a new report from Rolling Stone Magazine.
The lawyers are reportedly planning to argue that Giuliani and Eastman misled Trump about the possibility of Vice President Mike Pence discarding certified election results, which would have allowed Trump to claim victory after losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
According to sources cited in the report, Trump’s defense will argue that he was given flawed advice from his lawyers, despite objections from his own White House counsel and senior officials in the Department of Justice. This defense, which Trump reportedly favors and his legal team supports, attempts to shift responsibility onto the counsel he chose to follow.
One source mentioned that John Eastman and Rudy Giuliani provided considerable counsel, but the validity of that advice will be left for others to consider.
However, some, like Steven Groves, a former Trump spokesperson, express doubts about the effectiveness of this strategy. Groves compared it to an “advice-of-counsel defense,” explaining that even with legal advice, a client cannot use it as a justification for engaging in illegal actions, drawing an analogy to a hypothetical situation involving the misuse of obscure laws.
“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,'” he said, according to the report.
