TRUMP’S LEGAL TEAM FAILS TO SUPPORT THEIR BOSS

…In trying to defend their boss, Trump’s legal team has targeted his many gaffes

The president’s legal team ignored many of Trump’s bogus concerns

OK, let’s take on the idea that the president keeps supporting, that bogus, “Crowdstrike Conspiracy”.

So what exactly is “Crowdstrike”. 

Crowdstrike is a Ukraine cybersecurity firm that the conspiracy says had a stolen computer server with Hillary Clinton’s missing e-mails. 

First let’s look at the possibility of this concept of a conspiracy.

First, it would not be one server, it would be many servers and you will remember that the FBI that investigated Clinton’s e-mails, didn’t need to actually take away her server.  They just “mirrored” all the servers involved.  That would be, “mirroring” or “copying” the data on all those servers involved in the investigation.

The idea of a stolen single server with all of Hillary’s e-mails being somewhere in the Ukraine, this is a laughing stock among all those that are technically astute in the cyber world.

But this where the president’s defense team continues to support.

President Trump’s defense team ended their extended opening argument on Tuesday, where they laid Trump’s bogus reasons to ask Ukraine for specific investigations which included Crowdstrike.

But then they spent almost no time supporting the investigation that Trump wanted.

Trump’s team tried to argue that the investigations requests were legitimate.  It focused mostly on the idea that Hunter Biden’s employment at a Ukrainian gas company was the bigger problem. It spent less time arguing for the theory that Trump actually raised with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky on their July 25 phone call.  That was where Trump’s theory that the then-Vice President Joe Biden had sought to help his son by pushing out Ukraine’s top prosecutor.

Also there was that other investigation Trump really wanted.  Trump’s legal team spent zero time talking about involving that same cybersecurity firm, “CrowdStrike” and that server that was supposedly located in Ukraine. Trump’s team didn’t utter the word “CrowdStrike” once in the last three days.  In fact, nor did it even mention a “server” in Ukraine.  It instead more broadly defended the idea that Ukraine might have interfered in the 2016 election.

To be very clear, the ideas that Ukraine interfered in the election and that Hunter Biden’s work was a problem, they weren’t what Trump asked Ukraine to investigate.

“I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say CrowdStrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people. … The server, they say Ukraine has it,” That’s what Trump said. This is according to the rough transcript of his call with Zelensky that the White House released.

Rather than even addressing it, Trump’s legal team instead did defended the idea that Ukraine could have simply interfered in some fashion in the election.

“There is absolutely nothing wrong with asking a foreign leader to help get to the bottom of all forms of foreign interference in an American presidential election,” deputy White House counsel Michael Purpura said.

Trump’s personal lawyer Jay Sekulow accused the Democrats of making a “straw man” argument that it was either Russia or Ukraine.  He said they had implied that the Mueller report “somehow debunked the idea that there might be, you know, interference from other countries, including Ukraine.”

This is a real stretch of the truth.

Yes, Trump’s defense team actually said that they were questioning all 17 of the US, and its allies investigative associations, that all agreed that that it was Russia that interfered in the 2016 election and that Ukraine had nothing to do with the Interference.

Jane Raskin, The other lawyer on the team, said Rudolph Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer accused of directing the shadow foreign policy campaign in Ukraine, “was gathering evidence regarding Ukrainian election interference to defend his client against the false allegations being investigated by special counsel Mueller."

It's amazing that Trump’s team is actually going along with issues that have been debunked multiple times such as that Robert Mueller had a “false investigation”. 

None of these arguments addressed Trump’s actual conspiracy theory about “Crowdstrike”, though.  Even if Trump’s interest was mainly about interference, this was something that Trump’s own FBI director has repudiated.

“We have no information that indicates that Ukraine interfered with the 2016 presidential election,” FBI leader, Christopher Wray has said, as he warned people to be wary of those pushing the wrong idea.

As for dealing with the Bidens, Trump’s legal team spent much more time talking about Hunter Biden’s employment at the Ukraine’s Burisma company, than about Joe Biden’s efforts to remove Ukraine’s then-top prosecutor, Viktor Shokin.  Remember, Trump in his now famous call with Zelensky focused on the elder Biden, who he twice accused for stopping the prosecution of the Burisma company.

 “The other thing, there’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump told Zelensky, according to the transcript. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.”

Hunter Biden’s name was invoked more than 90 times over the last three days of the trial, but Hunter’s father’s actions came up much less often. There were only two times that Trump’s team stated in detail the idea that Joe Biden actually sought to thwart a prosecution and both times they offered logical holes for Joe Biden's role.

The former Florida attorney general, Pam Bondi, focused on top State Department official George Kent testifying that Burisma had a corruption problem and that Hunter Biden’s employment there was a problem. But she just happened to leave out that Kent said that, “Joe Biden didn’t do anything improper.”

Bondi also botched the story’s details . She recounted that: ″the New York Times publishes an article that Prosecutor General [Viktor] Shokin was investigating Burisma and its owner, [Mykola] Zlochevsky.”

However, the actual Times story makes no mention of Shokin or even of Ukraine investigating Burisma.  It instead, refers to Ukraine declining to cooperate with a British investigation of Burisma.

Bondi also said that, at the time Biden successfully got Shokin removed, “there was ongoing investigation into the oligarch Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma.” But US and Ukrainian officials have said Shokin wasn’t actively investigating Burisma at the time; indeed, he was accused of being too soft on corruption.

Trump team’s found it difficult to defend Trump because they had to establish that the investigations he was pursuing were legitimate.  Otherwise, it looks much more like he was just out to tar the Bidens and pursue his pet political causes, rather than rooting out actual, “corruption.”  That's the real truth.

Rather than defend Trump’s actual theories, his own defense team steered well clear of those theories and they pretended he was alleging a similar, but not a “real conspiracy.”

There are only a few more hours left on the clock in which they can expanded their defense.  They have devoted precious little time to what Trump has actually said.  

Let’s face it.  The fact that his team wasn’t willing to actually vouch for their boss and what he said, speaks volumes to the American public.

Copyright G. Ater 2020