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Trump Plans To Request Change Of Venue To ... West Virginia

Sure, why not?

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(Photo by Ali Shaker/VOA)

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed. — Sixth Amendment

Americans are pretty big on trying criminal cases where the crime was committed. We even put it in our Constitution!

Nevertheless, Donald Trump’s lawyers have responded to the most recent indictment by vowing to try to move his case out of DC to West Virginia, a state where 69 percent of the potential jury pool voted for him in 2020. Here’s attorney John Lauro explaining to CBS’s Ed O’Keefe that the state’s “close proximity” to the District and “much more diverse” population make it a natural venue for the former president’s trial.

Well … Lauro says a lot of crazy stuff on TV. Last night he claimed that Trump had a First Amendment right to tell Pence to steal the election for him, and before Trump was even indicted in DC, he was promising to get the court to televise the trial. It’s one thing to BS a news anchor, though, and it’s quite another to try this with a federal judge — particularly one who already told your client “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.”

Meanwhile, even Trump’s opponents in the presidential primary have gotten the memo that they need to trash DC residents as unfit to judge the former president.

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“The reality is a DC jury would indict a ham sandwich and convict a ham sandwich if it was a Republican ham sandwich,” said Florida’s charisma-challenged governor.

“I think Americans need to be able to remove cases out of DC,” he droned on, without explaining how residents of the nation’s capital are not Americans.

While cases are sometimes transferred out of venues where particularly heinous crimes were committed — think Timothy McVeigh’s Oklahoma City bombing trial being moved from Oklahoma to Colorado — multiple January 6 defendants have already tried and failed to get their cases moved out of DC.

Perhaps Lauro will be arguing that his client is more infamous than a terrorist who killed 168 people and was later executed for it. As for Trump, he seems less concerned about the venue, and more excited about Lauro’s suggestion last night that Trump will use the case to “prove” once and for all that the 2020 election was marred by major fraud.

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In a social media post attacking Mike Pence, Trump wrote, “He didn’t fight against Election Fraud, which we will now be easily able to prove based on the most recent Fake Indictment & information which will have to be made available to us, finally – a really BIG deal.”

Let’s see if Trump and his counsel try any of these shenanigans tomorrow when this circus rolls into town for his initial appearance.

US v. Trump [Docket via Court Listener]

Liz Dye lives in Baltimore where she writes about law and politics and appears on the Opening Arguments podcast.

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