Some of the most damning testimony against Trump comes from one of his former lawyers who testified to the grand jury. That lawyer recalls the president asking: “Well what if we, what happens if we just don’t respond at all or don’t play ball with them?”

So yes, it looks like Donald Trump is a dead duck in the courtroom.

That said, Attorney General Merrick Garland should not have allowed his special counsel, Jack Smith, to bring this prosecution in the first place.

There are a few reasons for this. The most important is that the meat of the indictment is 31 separate counts against the former president for violating a train wreck of a statute: the 1917 Espionage Act.

[I didn’t realize that Eli Lake was now over at the Free Press. Or maybe this is a side gig. Either way, he’s always worth reading. On the argument about the Espionage Act, however, I don’t fully agree. If we take counterintelligence seriously, we have to penalize those who expose nat-sec material without authorization. Even if you repeal 18 USC 793, you’d have to replace it with something nearly identical to enforce the kind of information security that national defense requires. We would just call it something else than the Espionage Act — maybe the Happy Good-Time Patriotic Act or some equally lame acronym-producing title these days. But still, read all of Eli’s argument. — Ed]