Former federal prosecutor Francey Hakes told Newsmax on Wednesday that because former President Donald Trump is not a lawyer, he "had to decide who to rely on" for legal counsel in the days after the 2020 election.
"Mike Pence said something today about that," Hakes said during an appearance on Newsmax's "The Record With Greta Van Susteren." "He said that the president was told what he wanted to hear.
"I worked directly for the attorney general and the deputy attorney general. People absolutely kiss their behinds who work for them. That's how it works when you're very high up in the government. I've never worked directly for a president, but I can imagine it's just magnified by so many times."
Pence, while on the stump at the Indiana State Fair in Indianapolis on Wednesday, told reporters that Trump had "crackpot lawyers ... telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear."
"President Trump is not a lawyer and, other than his few years in the presidency, he was never in government either," Hakes said. "So he has to decide who to rely upon for advice. As someone who I think we can all agree has a towering ego, because all he does is talk about loyalty, it makes sense to me that he's listening to the people that he wants to listen to that are telling him what he wants to hear — which is that he, the beloved president with 70 some million votes, certainly won, and they've got to figure out a way to prove it.
"All they have to do is prove it, and he'll be staying in office. I could see that happening easily. That doesn't make it a crime."
On Tuesday, the Washington, D.C., grand jury impaneled by special counsel Jack Smith, handed down a 45-page, four-count indictment against Trump that also lists six unidentified co-conspirators.
The charges stem from the two months after the November 2020 election, in which Trump claimed that the election had been stolen from him and urged local election officials to challenge voting results in their states. Trump also sought to have Pence, his vice president, decline to certify the results.
Hakes also speculated on how the judge overseeing the case might approach it to avoid any insinuation of bias, given its uniqueness.
"I hope that the judge is going to take this as a very unique case and that she needs to be bend-over-backwards-type careful with every motion and every request by the defense because it's going to be heavily scrutinized if President Trump were to get convicted after a jury trial," she said. "There's no question that it will be the most scrutinized case in U.S. history because it is the most unique case in United States history.
"So she's going to be very conscious of that, even if she has a bias because she was appointed by President Obama. I'm not saying she does, but if she does, I suspect she's going to be very careful with everything she does."
"I think this is a complicated case when you're talking about trying to figure out whether Donald Trump really believed he had been cheated in the election," she continued. "I think, potentially, there is a magnificent amount of evidence out there, just a huge amount of evidence, with respect to what different states did, how they changed election rules during the election, whether there were issues with voting machines and absentee ballots, signature verification and all of those things are going to take time and money in order to suss out for the defense."
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