“advice of counsel” is a tough defense to assert. It comes with some preconditions that could prove highly damaging to Trump as well as legal hurdles that the jury could quickly find render the defense unavailable to him.

one thing that disappears right away is your right to assert that your communications with those lawyers are “privileged.”

Skipping a bunch of the other items why it’s tough and going for the trap:

flipping attorneys is problematic, normally, because even if they agree to squawk, prosecutors normally can’t put them on a stand and ask them to testify about communications with their client. That’s because the attorney-client privilege belongs to the client. It isn’t something attorneys by themselves can decide to waive.

But here, again by putting advice of counsel at issue, Trump himself has waived the privilege.

In short, Jack Smith appears to have leveraged the advice of counsel defense by naming a bunch of lawyer co-conspirators. This could permit him to crack open the black box of the conspiracies, should any co-conspirator cooperate.