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Donald Trump Suggests Pleading Guilty If DOJ Will 'Pay Me Some Damages,' Apparently Teeing Up Insanity Defense
Trump seems to think the government is in the practice of paying people to go to prison.

Donald Trump took some time out of trying to find someone — anyone — admitted in Florida willing to represent him in his federal criminal case to talk to
the folks at Politico about his plan to keep running from prison if need be. Hey, Lyndon LaRouche did it! Trump’s take on the indictment touched a lot of the standard talking points — sweating that he didn’t do anything wrong… some garbage about the inapposite Presidential Records Act… insults for the prosecutors — but buried in the wreckage of this train wreck was this gem…

Trump predicted he would not be convicted and said he did not anticipate taking a plea deal, though he left open the possibility of doing so “where
they pay me some damages.”

Ah, yes. That famous practice of paying defendants to plead guilty! Trump doesn’t have a crackerjack legal team at this point, but in the off chance
he’s reading this, when a defendant agrees that they will go to prison “if
you make it worth my while,” the “worth my while” part is not cash, it’s slightly less prison.

These comments suggest Trump thinks he’s looking at the federal equivalent of
a parking ticket. Which may well be the product of incredibly dumb people in his echo chamber pretending that this is a Presidential Records Act case even though it would cease to be that somewhere around the point that he started showing Kid Rock national security secrets and talking to his lawyers about pretending he didn’t have these documents. Allegedly.

Far from a federal misdemeanor, Trump’s looking at hard time for these
charges. The sentencing guidelines are not mandatory — and in the unlikely event Judge Aileen Cannon stays on this case and allows it to reach the jury she could blow off the sentence entirely — but just an individual 18 U.S.C. § 793(e) charge in the indictment would net Donald Trump 210 to 262 months of prison time, which is upwards of 22 years. Just Security notes that with an acceptance of responsibility — which no one expects to see — Trump can get it knocked down to 151 to 188 months. Other charges in the indictment offer lighter base sentences, but the point remains that

Maybe he’s thinking about the Central Park 5 case that Trump infamously threw himself into. After stirring up the racist frenzy with a full-page ad
demanding the death penalty for the ultimately innocent defendants. The city ultimately paid the defendants millions to make up for the confessions law enforcement bullied out of them. Perhaps in Trump’s mind this is the model
for a confession, though he’s skipping over the years spent wrongfully
confined in prison and the actually innocent part of securing a cash settlement.

Is there an insanity defense to — let’s see here — espionage?

The answer is no. But until Trump finds himself a lawyer willing to take on this case, there doesn’t seem to be anyone willing to tell him that.

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