• Nougat@kbin.social
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    8 months ago

    This is fairly old (1961), but Advice of Counsel is a legitimate defense in some cases.

    What’s at issue, especially with Trump, is that if he relies on Advice of Counsel as a defense, it’s elementary to show that many legal advisers told him “No, you can’t do that,” and he chose to listen to the advisers who said he could. IANAL, but it would seem that that personal choice of which counsel to take advice from (“This is what I want to do; I’m going to find a lawyer who tells me I can.”) would make an Advice of Counsel defense void.

    • Nightwingdragon@lemmy.world
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      8 months ago

      Right, but my point was the “advice of counsel” defense isn’t the get out of jail free card that Trump and Bannon are trying to portray it as. There’s a whole ordeal that has to occur for that defense to be valid. It’s much more than the “Hey, my lawyer said it was OK, so I went with it. We’re good now, right?” argument that they’re trying to make.