Karl Rove: There’s a ‘strong likelihood’ the Senate will convict Trump if Giuliani is his attorney

GOP political strategist Karl Rove said Sunday on Fox News that he believes the Senate will indeed vote to convict President Donald Trump for inciting an insurrection if he lets Rudy Giuliani serve as his attorney.

Rove told Fox host Mike Wallace:

“Normally we’d say not much chance [of conviction]. But [Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s] statement is a sign that every Republican senator needs to take this seriously.”

The former adviser to President George W. Bush then added:

“And I think it’s all going to boil down to what’s the president’s defense? Rudy Giuliani charted a very bad course for the president in the morning papers when he suggested that the argument was going to be, well, there couldn’t have been incitement because all the charges of widespread voter fraud are true.”

During the discussion, Rove also noted that he’d heard Giuliani planned to use election fraud conspiracy theories as a defense of Trump, and suggested that would be a very bad idea:

“(Voter fraud allegations) have been rejected by over 50 courts with judges appointed by President Trump, President Obama, President Bush, President Clinton and I think even one Reagan justice.”

That means, Rove concluded, that Giuliani and Trump don’t have a leg to stand on:

“So if it’s the Rudy Giuliani defense, there’s a strong likelihood that more than 17 Republicans will [vote for conviction], because essentially that argument is, this was justified, the attack on the Capitol and the attempt to end the congressional hearing on certifying the election was justified because all these charges are true. And frankly, they aren’t.

“I think it really boils down to what’s the defense that the president is going to make. And if it’s Rudy Giuliani’s defense, I think it raises the likelihood of more than 17 Republicans voting for conviction.”

Let’s hope Rove is right. Because one of the advantages of a guilty verdict in the Senate impeachment trial would be that Trump could never run for public office again. That alone is a reason for celebration.

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