"In The Technical Sense Of Extraordinary People"*

BREAKING: Georgia election officials opened an investigation Monday into Donald Trump's phone call pressuring Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to "find" enough votes to change the results. President Joe Biden defeated Trump by nearly 12,000 votes. https://t.co/PaG22yT9GL

— AJC (@ajc) February 8, 2021

I’ve read that Trump will face criminal investigations; but that he may tie them up in court for years. This kind of “analysis” confuses civil cases seeking tax documents with criminal cases.  Interlocutory appeals (appeals before a final judgment/verdict) are rare but bread and butter for Trump’s lawyers. They are also pretty much a creature of civil cases, and grounds for interlocutory appeal are rare in those. They are even rarer in criminal cases, where the basis for such appeals is much thinner. Trump could, of course, appeal verdicts against him.  But there’s another problem...

The quality of Trump’s lawyers since the election has declined sharply.  Twitter is full of reports of the typos and legal errors in the “briefs” filed for the impeachment trial. Such errors don’t matter there, but it indicates the caliber of lawyer Trump has been able to attract. It’s less that defense attorneys don’t want to be seen representing Trump than it is Trump is the client from hell.  Did he fire his first team of impeachment lawyers because they wouldn’t continue his lie about the election, or because they wouldn’t go on FoxNews?  Or because he refused to pay them what they asked for?  (Time on TeeVee shouting with Sean Hannity is billable, too.)  Most respectable criminal lawyers won’t grandstand, either. And where the errors in the impeachment briefs, and the wild arguments, don’t really matter in the Senate (Trump’s appearance via lawyers is purely pro forma; he could refuse to even send a paralegal to the well of the Senate and he wouldn’t be convicted), they matter mightily in the courts, as we saw with Trump’s “challenges” to the election.

Trump is not going to tie up criminal or civil cases in court with the lawyers he can hire now.  Hell, he couldn't do it over the election.

Today we'll see an attempt by Trump lawyers to massively re-write history. They'll show clips of Stacey Abrams & other Democrats talking past elections.

Let's be clear... none of them tried to overturn elections via courts. They didn't incite insurrection. It was not the same.

— Rina Shah (@RinainDC) February 9, 2021

Trump is hiring clowns now.  He's been hiring clowns, or insisting his lawyers hold clownish legal positions, since the election.  How'd that work out for him?

*Trump's lawyer, in the Senate trial.  Who also explained what a "record player" was.  I mean, I'm a geezer; but people still buy "record players."  And I would never explain the physical nature of a record player ("you drop the needle") in an effort to be "folksy."  As I said, not the best lawyers...)