Natasha Bertrand has a piece in The Atlantic detailing how drumpf and company are switching gears from “no collusion” to “collusion’s just peachy”.
“In a motion to dismiss a new lawsuit accusing President Donald Trump’s campaign team of illegally conspiring with Russian agents to disseminate stolen emails during the election, Trump campaign lawyers have tried out a new defense: free speech.
Furthermore, the Trump lawyers argued, the First Amendment protects the campaign’s “right to disclose information—even stolen information—so long as (1) the speaker did not participate in the theft and (2) the information deals with matters of public concern.”
...the right to free speech, the campaign’s lawyers argued, supersedes the right to privacy. “At a minimum, privacy cannot justify suppressing true speech during a political campaign,” they wrote. Quoting from the Citizens United case, they added that the First Amendment leaves parties “‘free to obtain information from diverse sources in order to determine how to cast their votes.’ It would eviscerate that guarantee to punish true disclosures made in a political campaign.”
Ian Bassin, the executive director of Protect Democracy, which represents the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, told me that the brief “seems like the technical legal version of the more political argument the Trump team has been floating, and will make in earnest, should Robert Mueller eventually find that the campaign engaged in a conspiracy like the one we allege, which seems very possible given how the indictments he’s already brought line up with the complaint in this case. We of course intend to rebut that argument in the litigation, as it’s wrong.”
Yeah, great argument…
“I didn’t steal the drugs, I was just caught peddling them on the street, so you have to clear me.”
I don’t think so.