JURIES WILL DECIDE WHETHER TRUMP KNEW HE'D LOST BASED ON VIBES, NOT FACTS

As I imagine you've already guessed, I find ABC's "bombshell" Trump story underwhelming:

Former President Donald Trump's final chief of staff in the White House, Mark Meadows, has spoken with special counsel Jack Smith's team at least three times this year, including once before a federal grand jury, which came only after Smith granted Meadows immunity to testify under oath, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The sources said Meadows informed Smith's team that he repeatedly told Trump in the weeks after the 2020 presidential election that the allegations of significant voting fraud coming to them were baseless, a striking break from Trump's prolific rhetoric regarding the election.

Really? That's it? That's the bombshell?

I know that demonstrating Trump's awareness of the fact that he lost the 2020 election is key to Jack Smith's case. David French writes:

As I’ve explained in various pieces, and as the former federal prosecutor Ken White explained to me when I guest-hosted Ezra Klein’s podcast, proof of criminal intent is indispensable to the criminal cases against Trump, both in Georgia and in the federal election case. While the specific intent varies depending on the charge, each key claim requires proof of conscious wrongdoing — such as an intent to lie or the “intent to have false votes cast.”

I'm just a schmuck blogger, not a semi-famous D.C. lawyer. I don't want to argue with Popehat, or even David French, about the importance of demonstrating that Trump knew he'd lost.

But I question whether it's possible to demonstrate that merely by demonstrating that important advisers told Trump he'd lost. When we talk about Trump, we're talking about a guy who monomaniacally proclaims that he was cheated out of a second term. He brings this up even at unrelated and inappropriate moments. It's been his principal subject in virtually every public utterance since November 2020. I think attempting to prove that he knew he was lying will be like attempting to prove that a prominent evangelical preacher doesn't believe in God. There may be famous preachers who actually are secret atheists. But if a famous preacher talks about God every time he speaks, and if he has a large following precisely because of the compelling, emotional way they talk about God, and if he continues to invoke God (and rail against those who don't believe in God) while facing a court challenge that turns on questions of faith, will the entire jury believe the charismatic preacher's characterization of his own state of mind, or a few uncharismatic aides who say the preacher is a phony?

It's possible that most jurors will accept the government's case, but I strongly suspect that some won't. In a country where a third of the population thinks the 2020 election was rigged, I find it hard to imagine that a jury will unanimously believe Trump's protestations were mere theater.

Even I suspect that Trump, in his bizarre way, believes he won the election. He judges assertions based on whether they're beneficial to him, not on whether they're truthful. I don't think he believes in truth.

I wish the Trump election cases turned on procedure, not mental state. Trump was a major-party presidential candidate and America's highest government official. As such, he should have understood how we resolve disputes in this society: We go to court. The disputing parties present their cases before judges. Once all avenues of appeal are exhausted, that's it -- our system provides no more recourse. That should be what prosecutors are endeavoring to demonstrate: not that Trump believed he'd been cheated, but that he knew he'd argued his case before court after court and had lost repeatedly. A person in his position should have known that that was our system's final judgment. That should be what we talk about when we talk about his state of mind.