I suppose it was only a matter of time until one of Trump’s co-criminals trotted out the “just following orders” defense that didn’t quite work for the Nazis at Nuremberg:
… former DOJ official Jeffrey Clark is now claiming in Fulton County court that he only took the actions he did because Donald Trump instructed him to in his role as then-President.
I wonder if Clark’s lawyers will cite to Richard Nixon’s pronouncement that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”.
The thing is, he’s got at least an even chance of prevailing on this argument if he can get it to the Supreme Court. Of course the court will have to come up with a way to change the precedent a bit, to “when a Republican president does it, that means it’s not illegal”, because after all, we have to preserve the possibility that we can put Joe Biden in jail for crimes we still can’t define.
It is a bit ironic that Jeff Clark is the first, to my knowledge anyway, to plead the “just following orders” defense, inasmuch as from everything that we’ve heard about the way these crimes went down, he pretty much pushed his way forward and begged for the chance to follow those orders after even Bill Barr refused to do so.
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