Trump says Atlanta judge’s lies help uncover truth

Donald Trump tried Thursday to convince a state judge to drop his election interference case in Georgia, citing a tortured relationship between lies and truth to make his point.

Trump’s lawyers have argued that lies are not only protected by the First Amendment; Lies are sometimes essential, his lawyers said, to uncovering the truth.

The morning hearing could prove a crucial step as Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis takes her criminal case against the former president to trial. Judge Scott McAfee, who recently dealt a blow to the DA’s office by investigating her romantic relationship with a prosecutor she supervised, is now questioning whether Trump’s continued lies about 2020 election fraud are constitutionally protected by the first amendment.

Fulton County judge allows Trump to appeal Fani Willis ruling

On Thursday morning, Trump’s lead defense attorney, Steve Sadow, asked the judge to drop the criminal charges on those grounds.

“Campaigns and elections have always been considered the zenith of protected speech. What we have here is election speech,” Sadow said in court.

In particular, Trump’s team fought back against two counts in Trump’s indictment that accuse him of making “false statements and writings.” One thinks of how Trump told Brad Raffensperger, the nation’s top elections official, during his infamous phone call on January 2, 2021, that he had actually won by 400,000 votes in Georgia (which was false), that nearly 5,000 dead people had voted (they did not vote). ‘t), and that defamed election worker, Ruby Freeman, was a professional ballot-stuffing fraudster (she wasn’t).

The other charge seeks to hold Trump accountable for his September 17, 2021 open letter to Raffensperger which said: “as you have previously indicated, the number of false and/or irregular votes is far greater than what is necessary to change the outcome of the elections in Georgia. »

But in trying to knock down those criminal charges, Trump’s lawyer also explored the little-known merits of lying.

“As Socrates’ methods suggest, examining a false statement – ​​even one made deliberately to mislead – can promote a form of thinking that ultimately helps one realize the truth,” a Sadow said, citing a 2012 Supreme Court ruling examining whether falsehoods are constitutionally acceptable. protected.

In trying to convince the judge, Sadow reduced the indictment to nothing more than prosecutors trying to punish Trump for telling what the prosecutor says are lies.

“The only reason this speech is ‘unprotected,’ in the state’s view, is because they characterize it as false,” Sadow said.

Donald Wakeford, the Fulton DA’s lead prosecutor in charge of the anti-corruption division, mocked Trump’s lawyer.

“It’s interesting to hear from Mr. Trump’s lawyers about the utility of lies,” he said.

“It’s not that the defendant was taken into a courtroom because the prosecutors didn’t like what he said,” Wakeford continued. “It hurts the government. That’s why it’s illegal…it’s not just that you made a false statement. It’s because you swore to it in a court document.

Judge’s ruling on Fulton County Prosecutor Fani Willis is a mess

Wakeford emphasized that Trump’s conduct in the tumultuous months following the November 2020 election cannot be downplayed as a mere expression of his opinion. After all, the indictment details how Trump and his team pressured state officials into obtaining 11,780 non-existent votes to overturn the election results and attempted to employ fake voters with the ultimate goal of circumventing the certification of the legitimate vote in Congress.

Instead, Wakeford said, the judge must view Trump’s band of misfits as “a criminal organization.”

“It’s not just that he lied over and over again…it’s that every single one of them was being used in criminal activity with criminal intent,” Wakeford told the judge. “What we heard here today is an attempt to rewrite the indictment…and it was just a guy asking questions.” Not someone who was part of an overarching criminal conspiracy to try to overturn an election he didn’t win.

A second member of the prosecution team also took the stand: John E. Floyd, the nationally renowned RICO expert whom the prosecutor hired to help build this case against the former president as part of a repression of the crowd through racketeering. Floyd told the judge that even if Trump’s lies were actually true — and could be considered free speech — in reality, he still participated in an overarching criminal conspiracy.

“For purposes of the RICO statute, it doesn’t matter whether or not it was conduct consistent with the First Amendment,” he said.

Sadow then pushed back on the idea, seeming dismayed that the government would even consider cracking down on Trump for telling the truth — an obviously hypothetical situation.

Before the court took its lunch recess, Judge McAfee still seemed unsure when he would consider Trump’s First Amendment claims. But he raised the specter of a last-minute surprise, suggesting they could have a full trial – which is expected to take months and would be a historic proceeding – only to see Trump’s lawyers raise free speech issues .

That would put McAfee in the position of potentially handing Trump a “dictated verdict,” he said, a total victory won in one fell swoop — the ultimate deus ex machina.

“Are we going through a whole trial? God forbid, there should be a conviction, and then we go back and try to determine (that)? » asked Sadow.

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