Former US Attorney General Bill Barr said it will not “come out very well” for former US President Donald Trump if he decides to take the stand in the election fraud case that he pleaded not guilty to on Thursday.
Barr served as the US attorney general during the George W. Bush and Trump administrations.
Barr was referring to Trump lawyer John Lauro’s plan to utilize an advice of counsel defense against the charges. The one-time AG said the defense likely won’t be used in the trial because it would require Trump to testify under oath on the stand.
“Also, I don’t think this defense of advice of counsel is going to go forward because I think the president would have to get on the stand and subject himself to cross-examination in order to raise that, and he also has to waive attorney-client privilege,” Barr said.
“I think it would not come out very well for him,” Barr said when asked how he thinks Trump would perform on the stand. “I think he’d be subjected to very skilled cross-examination and I doubt he remembers all the different versions of events he’s given over the last few years,” Barr added.
Lauro appeared on US media outlets in the hours after Trump was indicted on Tuesday, where he said Trump was acting on what he believed to be reasonable advice from his lawyer when he asked then-Vice President Mike Pence to halt Congress’ count of presidential electors.
“You have one of the leading constitutional scholars in the United States, John Eastman, say to President Trump, ‘This is a protocol that you can follow. It’s legal.’ That eliminates criminal intent,” Lauro argued.
While Eastman’s contention that Pence had the power to stop the electoral vote count has been widely disputed by law experts, Trump’s legal team would only have to argue that Trump was acting in good faith based on Eastman’s advice.
Trump remains the overwhelming favorite to win the Republican nomination for president. Previous polls taken after Trump’s other two indictments, seem to indicate they had little to no effect on the opinion of likely Republican primary voters.
After leaving court on Thursday, Trump called it “a very sad day for America” and argued that he is being prosecuted because he is current US President Joe Biden’s biggest political threat. “When you look at what's happening, this is a persecution of a political opponent. This was never supposed to happen in America,” Trump told reporters.