The legal team of former President Donald Trump in the case of his third indictment, in which he is being federally charged with allegedly scheming to overturn the 2020 presidential election is using a defense. It is that Trump was merely listening to the advice of his counsel. But according to a report in Rolling Stone, witnesses say some of that legal advice was coming from an unreliable source – and Trump knew it.
The counsel in question is Trump’s lawyer and ally Rudy Giuliani. The reporters Asawin Suebsaeng and Adam Rawnsley have detailed that the disgraced former mayor of New York was not only witnessed to have been inebriated at several points throughout the campaign, but that Trump knew Giuliani was a heavy drinker.
What prosecutor Jack Smith and his team wanted to know was exactly when Giuliani was known to have been drunk while giving legal advice to his client, the former president. If there’s an intersection between these two points, then it’s possible that Trump was knowingly taking legal advice from someone he knew was giving him bad legal advice and ignoring the fact that it was bad. That’s called “willful recklessness.”
Suebsaeng and Rawnsley wrote:
Some witnesses told Smith’s team that they saw Giuliani consuming significant quantities of alcohol; some told the special counsel’s office that they could clearly smell alcohol on Giuliani’s breath, including on election night, and that they noticed distinct changes in his demeanor from hours prior, the sources tell Rolling Stone.
Some have already told investigators that they were directly aware of moments when Trump had talked to others about Giuliani’s drinking, and that Trump spoke negatively about his then-top lawyer’s alcohol consumption. (Trump is known for being a longtime teetotaler.)
Specifically, former senior advisor to Trump Jason Miller told the Jan. 6 Committee: “I think the mayor was definitely intoxicated, but I do not know his level of intoxication when he spoke with the president.”
