SO THEY'RE USING MAGGIE HABERMAN TO TRY TO KEEP TRUMP OUT OF PRISON?

CNN reports:

Former President Donald Trump repeatedly told aides in the days following his 2020 election loss that he would remain in the White House rather than let incoming President Joe Biden take over, according to reporting provided to CNN from a forthcoming book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

"I'm just not going to leave," Trump told one aide, according to Haberman.

"We're never leaving," Trump told another. "How can you leave when you won an election?" ...

Haberman writes that in the immediate aftermath of the November 3 elections, Trump seemed to recognize he had lost to Biden. He asked advisers to tell him what had gone wrong. He comforted one adviser, saying, "We did our best." Trump told junior press aides, "I thought we had it," seemingly almost embarrassed by the outcome, according to Haberman
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But at some point, Trump's mood changed, Haberman writes, and he abruptly informed aides he had no intention of departing the White House in late January 2021 for Biden to move in.

He was even overheard asking the chair of the Republican National Committee, Ronna McDaniel, "Why should I leave if they stole it from me?"

Is this what really happened? It's possible. Or it's possible that this is just what Trumpworld wanted Haberman to write, because her reporting becomes conventional wisdom, and Trump's circle wants the public -- including potential jurors in any Trump trial -- to think Trump really believed he'd won the election.

For some of the possible charges against Trump related to the post-election period, it will be necessary to prove corrupt intent in order to convict. (Or at least that's what high-minded legal analysts say. I think what's necessary is finding twelve jurors who never watch Fox News. If even one is a regular viewer, the government can present days and days of smoking-gun evidence and Trump will still avoid conviction.)

The "corrupt intent" standard makes me furious. It appears that even if a reasonable person should have known that Joe Biden won the election, and a reasonable person who is a prominent government official, in fact the most prominent government official, really should have known that Joe Biden won the election, Trump can still get away with claiming lack of corrupt intent if he says that he didn't know, even if he once knew and then stopped knowing, under the influence of Sidney Powell, the My Pillow guy, the Overstock.com guy, and other fine legal minds.

This comes at a time when, as I recently noted, it appears that ordinary people who have voted illegally get much harsher sentences if they didn't know they were breaking the law than if they did know and tell the authorities that, hell yeah, they cheated (on behalf of the Republicans) because they were sure the evil Antichrists of the Democrat Party were already cheating. In that case, corrupt intent seems to get you a reduced sentence, or maybe I'm confusing that with white skin.

In any case, I haven't read Haberman's book, which goes on sale October 4, so maybe this is not what she's telling us. But for now it seems that her sources fed her the line that Trump's intent wasn't corrupt, and she's dutifully retransmitting it.