Early in my career as a prosecutor, I learned a valuable lesson from a seasoned and highly regarded criminal defense attorney.

The best defense in a trial before a jury is to attack the case that the prosecution doesn’t make. Fight on the ground that the prosecution has looked past or ignored. If the prosecution tries to “circle back” and cover that ground, the defense becomes about what the prosecution missed — or better yet, what didn’t they want the jury to know when they chose to ignore it in the first instance. //

When the prosecutor calls a young agent to the stand — and there is almost always at least one youngster involved in order to get the experience — that agent is going to spend a long time answering questions from me about all the things he/she did not do during the course of the investigation. That sets in the jurors’ minds the idea that I know more about how the investigation should have been handled than the investigators do, and that the investigators took shortcuts and ignored evidence. It’s not necessarily evidence of “innocence”, just the fact of ignoring evidence calls into question the completeness of what they did and their competence doing so.

That’s what Lindsey Graham did today — likely aided by Ted Cruz, Mike Lee, and a couple of other GOP Senators with trial experience in a courtroom. I’m not sure there is a single good trial lawyer among the Democrats in the Senate.