Trump Bounces Nonsensical Legal Defense Off Mar-a-Lago Crowd

Donald Trump appeared to survey a crowd at Mar-a-Lago late Friday about a questionable new legal defense in the ongoing federal probes into his push to overturn the 2020 election and hold onto classified materials. Referring to his two impeachment trials, he said: “They tried it in the Senate, they went through the whole process. And we won, we won through the whole process. … We went through two of them. And isn’t this sort of like double jeopardy?” He appeared to be echoing a bogus legal argument made on Fox News hours ahead of his Friday evening speech. Notably, double jeopardy doesn’t apply to impeachment cases—but that didn’t stop Trump from claiming he’s being tried twice for the same crime. A DOJ memorandum opinion published in 2000 outlined the following: “We conclude that the Constitution permits a former President to be criminally prosecuted for the same offenses for which he was impeached by the House and acquitted by the Senate while in office.” Earlier in the day on Fox News, host Geraldo Rivera argued Trump had “already been impeached for exactly these charges concerning the insurrection of January 6th, that is what impeachment is for.” “To now have a special prosecutor go over the same ground, to me, I submit, is double jeopardy,” Rivera said. Elsewhere in Trumpworld— also on Friday evening—Elon Musk fired off a Twitter poll asking users if Trump should be brought back on the platform. Even if Musk were to allow Trump back on, it remains unclear if Trump would leave Truth Social, as a person that’s spoken to the former president about the matter told The Daily Beast that Trump’s “serious” about staying on his own site.