Donald Trump confesses to crimes and predicts riots in the streets if charged. Its good.

There’s a reason Donald Trump is having such a hard time finding a competent lawyer, and that reason is donald trump.

Facing multiple grand jury investigations into his various campaign schemes, a congressional investigation and, most recently, a search warrant to search his home for illegally stored classified documents, the former president has caught on the air once again to discuss his legal issues. This time his host was Hugh Hewitt, who never lets his JD from the University of Michigan Law School get in the way of his abject sycophancy and dedication to advancing the Republican narrative.

“Do you feel like the Department of Justice is trying to indict you, Mr. President?” Hewitt began, unleashing the inevitable torrent of Russian-infused verbal diarrhea from his guest.

Well, there’s no reason they could, other than if they’re just sick and deranged, which is always possible, because I absolutely did, you saw the legal papers, absolutely nothing bad. And there’s no reason they can. And I’ll tell you what, I would have said they couldn’t raid a house either, because you know, that’s 4th Amendment stuff. And what they did is terrible. And I don’t think people are going to put up with it. If you noticed, the poll numbers are the highest they’ve ever been. People are not going to put up with this stuff. They armed the Department of Justice and the FBI. And you know, I don’t know how much you covered it, but I can tell you the bigger story would be, especially if it was, was reversed, that Danchenko got paid right after 2017, right after us , so I’m sitting in the Oval Office, and the FBI paid off, hired Danchenko to do all kinds of terrible things. When you think about this story, it’s incredible, Danchenko being the Russian. So it was them, Hugh, with the Russians, not me.

Cool.

Igor Danchenko is a minor figure in the Russia investigation who has been accused with Lying to the FBI by Special Counsel John Durham. With the news that Durham the grand jury disbandseven Hewitt can’t muster the energy to pretend to care about Danchenko.

“Well, the Russia Russia Russia story is over,” he said, attempting to get the former president back on track. “They are trying, I think, to indict people for planning to select alternative voters on 1/6. Did you receive a targeted letter, Mr. President? »

Trump responded in the negative, adding, “Alternate slates are actually common. I wasn’t involved with alt slates, but I can tell you a lot of people have been making alt slates for many, many years.

These would be “alternative facts”. The Trump campaign has helped assembly of slates fake voters despite his lawyers agreement that it was totally illegal, and that it is by no means “common” to attempt to substitute them for the voters actually chosen by the voters.

After saying he was not called before a grand jury, Trump agreed to Hewitt’s suggestion that he had declassified all Mar-a-Lago documents through a magical secret incantation in the presence of a former attorney. of the defense. Kash Patel.

“Not only that, I think other people were there as well,” he stammered. “But I have the absolute right to declassify, absolute. A president has that absolute right, and a lot of people don’t even dispute that anymore.”

He later dismissed a suggestion that he may have inadvertently kept the documents for 18 months after leaving office.

Remember this. It’s all been declassified, number one. And if you look at the presidential election, if you look at the law that’s been passed, it talks about what you can do, what you can’t do, how you negotiate with NARA, and then if you look at this who runs NARA is radical left, radical, radical left race, and then you take a look at Hillary with her 33,000 emails that have been deleted, and you take a look at Obama and to others, and people say Trump was treated very, very unfairly. Very, very unfairly. You just took a look.

Notably, this is not an argument made by Trump’s lawyers in the special main case before Judge Aileen Cannon, the friendliest of the friendly judges. Although they dance around it, referring to a “disagreement over the classification status of documents” and employing creepy quotation marks around all references to “classified documents”. But even Trump’s lawyers, bold as they are, never come out directly to support this cockamamie theory that everything Trump took out of the White House and stuck in his pool locker has been declassified — let alone submit a report. affidavit of Kash Patel attesting to the same.

Indeed, prosecutors called them on that little wheeze in their latest filing in support of exempting classified documents from both the special main examination and barring the use of documents seized in the case. ongoing investigation.

“Claimant does not actually assert – let alone provide any evidence – that any of the seized documents bearing classification marks have been declassified,” they wrote, adding that “Claimant has now filed several lengthy submissions with the Court who stop short of asserting that he in fact took any of these actions with respect to any of the documents seized, including those at issue in the stay motion.”

Also, that the record reflects that none of the laws implicated in the warrant rely on the classification status of the seized government documents. And anyway, the subpoena that Trump ignored called for the return of all documents bearing classified marks, which are by definition government property. So regardless of whether they were secretly declassified by Trump waving his hands above them as he packed his bags to leave the White House, the former president just confessed to knowingly retaining ownership. of the government in defiance of a subpoena to appear before a grand jury. The worst customer in the world!

Then Hewitt, after mocking that prosecutors could charge a ham sandwich, asked if Trump would still run for president in 2024 if impeached. But Trump wanted to answer a different question, and that question was how far can you go to incite violence without actually satisfying the Brandenburg test.

“I think if that happened, I think you would have problems in this country like we may not have seen before,” said the man who summoned his supporters to DC for a rally that took place. is transformed into an assault on the siege. of the government. “I don’t think the American people would support him.”

“I think they would have big problems, big problems. I don’t think they would support it. They won’t, they won’t stand still and put up with this ultimate hoax,” he added, prompting Hewitt to worry that “legacy media will say you’re trying to incite violence with this statement”.

“It’s not, it’s not incentive,” Trump scoffed. “I just say what I think. I don’t think the people of this country would accept that.

It’s not a threat, you see. It is a promise.

Is this little rantologist likely to return in a future DOJ filing? Let’s go 100%.

[Transcript]

Elizabeth Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes on law and politics.