NEW YORK (AP) – President Donald Trump offered a simple defense Thursday to accusations he broke campaign finance law by directing attorney Michael Cohen to orchestrate hush-money payments to conceal Trump’s alleged affairs: He was following terrible advice from a bad lawyer.
“I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law. He was a lawyer and he is supposed to know the law. It is called ‘advice of counsel,'” Trump wrote on Twitter.
The advice-of-counsel defense is a real thing. But Trump’s ability to use it, if he were ever formally accused of a crime, is far from certain. And it could be risky.
“People talk about advice-of-counsel as a defense more than it’s actually asserted, and it’s rarely successful,” said Dane Ciolino, a constitutional law professor at Loyola University in New Orleans.
Courts have held that the defense applies when a person has gone to a lawyer to ask about whether something is legal, disclosed all material facts, and then relied in good faith on the professional’s advice that no laws were being broken.