Axios Sneak Peek

August 02, 2023
Welcome back to Sneak. Smart Brevity™ count: 1,065 words ... 4 minutes.
📸 Situational awareness: Former President Trump will have his mugshot taken if he's indicted in Fulton County's investigation into efforts to interfere in Georgia's 2020 election, the county's sheriff told a local Atlanta TV station.
1 big thing — Trump's "delusion" defense
Photo: Robert Nickelsberg/Getty Images
Trump's legal team is teasing a risky defense to his historic third indictment:
- It's the idea that the former president genuinely believed his own lies about election fraud — despite being told by dozens of his closest advisers, allies and agencies that they were baseless.
Why it matters: If they proceed to trial, Trump's lawyers effectively could be asking a jury to believe that the former president was delusional — undermining special counsel Jack Smith's core thesis that Trump "knowingly" sought to defraud the country.
- The gambit could prove successful in court, where an already unfurling debate over the First Amendment is expected to play a starring role.
- Politically, however, the "delusion defense" would force Republicans into the uncomfortable position of defending a candidate who can't be trusted to distinguish reality from conspiracy — and who now wants to be president again.
Driving the news: The indictment details many occasions in which top officials and lawyers explained to Trump that his theories — ranging from dead people voting to machines altering votes to foreign interference — were baseless.
- As official campaign staffers grew frustrated, Trump increasingly began listening to conspiracy theorists such as Sidney Powell, whose attorneys said in response to a 2021 defamation lawsuit that "no reasonable person" would believe her bizarre claims were "truly statements of fact."
- "I'll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it's tough to own any of this when it's all just conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the mothership," a senior campaign official — who repeatedly told Trump his claims were untrue — wrote in an email on Dec. 8, 2020.
- Even Trump, the indictment alleges, privately acknowledged in December that Powell's claims about voting machine conspiracies sounded "crazy."
What they're saying: "I would like [prosecutors] to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations were false," Trump attorney John Lauro said on Fox News last night.
- "No sitting president has ever been criminally charged for his views, for taking a position," he added.

What to watch: Citing the subpoena power that Trump's lawyers will be entitled to in the discovery process, Lauro pledged to "re-litigate every single issue in the 2020 election."
- In other words, the Trump team may use his criminal trial to once again try to prove there was election fraud — and thereby de-fang Smith's charges.
- Remember: More than 60 election lawsuits brought by Trump and his allies were tossed out of court in the weeks after the election.
The bottom line: The House Jan. 6 committee hearings last summer gave Republicans a taste of the coming spectacle in federal court. The subsequent defeat of Trump-backed election deniers in the midterms likely has GOP leaders once again bracing for impact.
2. 💥 "Off the Rails" revisited

Key details from the Jan. 6 indictment were first reported in "Off the Rails," a special Axios long-form series published in January 2021 that raised the curtain on the final, chaotic days of the Trump presidency.
Excerpts from the first three episodes:
- A premeditated lie lit the fire: "For weeks, Trump had been laying the groundwork to declare victory on election night — even if he lost. But the real-time results, punctuated by Fox News' shocking call of Arizona for Biden, upended his plans and began his unraveling."
- Barbarians at the Oval: "The White House became a strange ghost town in the days after the election. ... In conversations in the Oval Office, Trump would occasionally slip and seem to acknowledge he lost, saying, "Can you believe I lost to that f***ing guy? That f***ing corpse?"
- Descent into madness: "Trump was sitting in the Oval Office one day in late November when a call came in from lawyer Sidney Powell. "Ugh, Sidney," he told the staff in the room before he picked up. "She's getting a little crazy, isn't she? She's really gotta tone it down. No one believes this stuff. It's just too much."
The latest: Former Vice President Mike Pence unleashed some of his harshest criticism yet in response to Trump's defense of his post-election pressure campaign, telling Fox News that the then-president and "his gaggle of crackpot lawyers" asked Pence to "literally reject votes" on Jan. 6.
3. ✍️ Anti-No Labels pledge
Sen. Joe Manchin (D-W.Va.), who has teased a possible third-party presidential run. Photo: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Two Democratic groups — the centrist Third Way and the progressive MoveOn — are trying to build a public pressure campaign to make it difficult for an independent "No Labels" presidential bid to gain any traction, Axios' Hans Nichols reports.
Driving the news: After briefing House and Senate chiefs of staff last week on how a No Labels' bid is likely to spoil the election for Biden, the groups followed up yesterday by asking the staffers to convince their bosses to publicly denounce the effort.
- "We, the undersigned elected officials, recognizing the urgent and unique threat to democracy in the form of right-wing extremism on the ballot in 2024, call on No Labels to halt their irresponsible efforts to launch a third-party candidacy," reads the statement for the lawmakers' signatures.
Between the lines: Third Way and MoveOn are agnostic on how lawmakers announce their opposition.
- For elected officials who tend not to sign proclamations like this, the groups are urging them to issue independent statements or take to social media to make their opposition clear.
- So far, Third Way is tracking more than 30 statements from Democratic lawmakers that have raised serious concerns or denounced No Label's plans.
4. 📺 Trump dines with Fox

Shortly after learning of his indictment, Trump dined last night with Fox News executives Jay Wallace and Suzanne Scott, the New York Times reports.
Why it matters: Wallace and Scott lobbied Trump to attend the Fox-hosted Republican debate on Aug. 23, which the former president has suggested he plans to skip.
- The Fox execs told Trump he "excels on the debate stage" as part of their "soft appeal," according to the Times.
- Trump, who has routinely attacked Fox for what he perceives as favorable coverage of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, said he hasn't made a decision and would keep an open mind.
📬 Thanks for reading tonight. This newsletter was copy edited by Kathie Bozanich.
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