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About a year after Donald Trump was initially indicted over his efforts to overturn his defeat in the 2020 presidential election, special counsel Jack Smith and his team decided it was time for a new superseding indictment related to the same underlying crimes. The move was apparently necessary as a result of a scandalous U.S. Supreme Court ruling that, to a radical degree, elevated the American presidency above the law.
Days later, as NBC News reported, the former president made his defense attorneys’ job a bit more complicated.
Former President Donald Trump said Sunday that he had “every right” to interfere with the 2020 election, even as two criminal cases involving those allegations hang over him. On Monday, Kamala Harris’ campaign charged that the comments were evidence that Trump believed he was “above the law.”
It’s not clear exactly which day the interview was conducted, but in an exchange that Fox News aired on Sunday, the Republican nominee ranted for a while about his country’s justice system before whining that he was “indicted for interfering with a presidential election,” which he added he had “every right to do.”
Broadly speaking, there are a few angles to this that are worth keeping in mind. The first is the point that Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign emphasized in response to the on-air comments.
“Everything Donald Trump has promised on the campaign trail — from ‘terminating’ the Constitution, to imprisoning his political opponents and promising to rule as a dictator on ‘day one’ — makes it clear that he believes he is above the law. Now, Trump is claiming he had ‘every right’ to interfere in the 2020 election. He did not,” a spokesperson for the Democratic presidential nominee said in a statement.
Second, by claiming he had “every right” to interfere in a presidential election, just days after he was indicted for allegedly trying to interfere in a presidential election, the former president’s rhetoric looked a bit like an ill-timed admission.
MSNBC’s Katie Phang, for example, described Trump’s comments as “criming and then confessing to the criming.”
But stepping back, the problem isn’t just that the Republican effectively admitted that he did what he was accused of doing, the problem is that he has done the same thing repeatedly in recent years.
For example, Trump admitted that he fired James Comey as the director of the FBI in the hopes of derailing an investigation against him. He confessed that he deliberately misled his own country about the severity of the coronavirus threat. He made provocative comments about his role in the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal. More recently, the GOP candidate made his lawyers’ life more difficult with comments about taking classified documents to his glorified country club.
The Atlantic’s Adam Serwer wrote in 2018, “Donald Trump can’t stop telling on himself.” Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said a year later: “What he’s been saying in public is the kind of thing I used to prosecute people for doing in private.”
After the Republican’s federal indictments, he was almost certainly told of his rights as a criminal defendant. The first one is something the former president has probably seen or heard on television: He has the right to remain silent, and anything he says can be used against him in a court of law.
As a rule, defense attorneys want their clients to take these rights seriously — and shut up accordingly. The more defendants remain silent, the less likely they are to say things that prosecutors will (a) hear; and (b) use.
But to know anything about Trump is to know he’s never been a “remain silent” kind of guy.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.