As expected, Judge Juan Merchan yesterday morning instructed jurors in Donald Trump’s hush money case on how to deliberate. What was much less expected, however, was that the former president and his allies advanced a very specific untruth about those jury instructions.
For example, in the late morning, a Fox News host published a social media post that read in part: “Judge Merchan just told the jury they don’t need unanimity to convict.” Shortly afterwards, the suspect himself published a related mission. “IT IS RIDICULOUS, UNCONSTITUTIONAL AND UNAMERICAN for the highly conflicted, radical left judge not to demand a unanimous decision on the false charges against me,” Trump wrote.
But it was a related item from the Republican senator. Marco Rubio from Florida that caught my eye.
When the Fox News host mischaracterized the jury instructions, you could say he’s not a lawyer and simply got confused. When Trump mischaracterized the jury instructions, it was even less surprising given that the Republican lies uncontrollably, has no background in law and routinely struggles to understand the basics of trial procedures.
But Rubio is a lawyer. He went to law school. He was a lawyer before embarking on a long career as a legislator.
In other words, the Republican senator has no excuse for getting this wrong — and he certainly botched the details in this case.
I understand that the relevant nuances are complex. My MSNBC colleague Hayes Brown went into depth on the matter in his last column, and I read it twice to make sure I fully understood the underlying problem. A Washington Post analysis summarized the matter in a helpful paragraph:
In other words, to convict Trump, the jurors must be unanimous. But prosecutors presented a number of different crimes tied to the former president’s alleged illegal means, and jurors may come to different conclusions about which of the laws he may have broken.
All of this brings us back to Rubio, who described the instructions in a nonsensical way, equated them with the USSR, and left his message online even after it had been discredited.
Sure, everyone makes mistakes, but Rubio – who, again, should have known better – put forward a wildly misleading claim that both undermines public confidence in the justice system and likely threatens the judge who did nothing wrong. will increase.
No one would want to be vice president more than anything.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
