I wrote for Politico today on all the reasons it doesn’t make sense to indict Trump, including that it will bring his misconduct into the legal realm where hair-splitting matters. Consider the notorious call to Brad Raffensperger:
From a layman’s perspective, the Raffensperger call was outrageous and damnable, a sitting president strong-arming a state official to get the election results he wanted.
From a defense lawyer’s perspective, it is different. Trump goes on and on about various categories of supposedly fraudulent votes, adding up to a victory of “at least” 400,000 votes. When he says his famous line, “I want to find 11,780 votes” — one more than Biden’s margin of victory — the context suggests he’s talking about literally finding them, not manufacturing them, from a vast pool of improper ballots.
The specific requests during the call were made by Trump’s staff and lawyers and had to do with information-sharing and a meeting to go through in detail the Trump team’s claims of fraud.
Near the end of the conversation, a Trump lawyer named Kurt Hilbert pipes up to say four categories of allegedly improper votes add up to 24,149 votes, enough “to change the results or place the outcome in doubt.” He says the Trump team believes the numbers are accurate, having had three or four experts look at them, but it wants to vet them with the secretary of state’s office. “We would like to sit down with your office,” he says, “and we can do it through purposes of compromise and just like this phone call, just to deal with that limited category of votes. And if you are able to establish that our numbers are not accurate, then fine.”
The call ended with an agreement that Raffensperger’s lawyers would be in touch with Trump’s lawyers.
Now, you might say that this interpretation of the call misses the forest for the trees and is far too lawyerly, but this is exactly the kind of close reading elicited by a criminal trial.