MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell kicked of his show on Wednesday with a commentary on Donald Trump’s myriad legal problems. But the target of his ire wasn’t Trump this time — or not directly, anyway — it was Trump’s lawyers, a group of people O’Donnell mocked for living “in abject fear” of their client.
“All of Donald Trump’s defense lawyers have already failed, more spectacularly in their representation of Donald Trump than anything they have ever done in their professional lives,” O’Donnell declared. Watch the clip above right now.
They failed, O’Donnell said, because they haven’t performed what he called “the most basic task… which is to control your client. Donald Trump is out of control, spewing poisonous, hateful, racist, sexist lies about the prosecutors and judges who are involved in the cases against him.”
O’Donnell detailed some of those, particularly his ire against Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis, adding that “every one of Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers knows that every poisonous, filthy word Donald Trump has said about the prosecutors, every one of those words, is a pathological lie.”
“And not one of those criminal defense lawyers has the professional dignity or human decency to disassociate himself” from Trump, O’Donnell continued.
The host dismissed Donald Trump’s attorneys as people who live in abject fear,” and as an example showed a clip of John Lauro, the attorney representing Trump against charges related to interfering with the 2020 election.
In the clip Lauro sputters and deflects when asked about a speech Trump gave where the disgraced ex-president called Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating his criminal behavior, “deranged.”
“John Lauro does not believe Jack Smith is deranged,” O’Donnell said. “John Lauro could have just said, ‘No,’ as most lawyers would, for that question, in a situation like that, if a defendant publicly insulted a prosecutor.”
Lauro, O’Donnell argued, was instead “terrified of the word no.”
“When you defend the pathological liar, the filth of the pathological lies is going to get all over you. It is going to cover you. You will not be the same after defending every word of pathological liar says. So the only things Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers have demonstrated so far is their complete failure to control their client,” O’Donnell argued.
O’Donnell then turned to remarks Trump made in New Hampshire this week, where he falsely accused Willis, who is Black, of having an affair with a former client, who Trump, still lying, claimed was a gang leader.
Fear of their client, and absolutely no shame whatsoever, associating themselves with the lies Donald Trump tells about prosecutors and judges.
“Everything he said about Fani Willis came from the deeply perverted cesspool of Donald Trump’s sick imagination. And he happily and perversely lied,” O’Donnell declared, noting Trump’s own history of unethical sexual behavior.
“Not one of Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers has any problem being associated with Donald Trump’s lying about District Attorney Fani Willis. [But] there is another option: ‘I quit.’ Any of Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers can say that any day,” O’Donnell said. “But none of them have ever quit because he’s racist.”
“Every one of Donald Trump’s criminal defense lawyers is too cowardly to quit and much too cowardly to tell Donald Trump to shut up,” O’Donnell added.
Watch, as we said, the whole thing above now.