Calling someone a “slimeball” boss may win you plaudits during 7th grade recess, former FBI General Counsel Andrew Weissmann implied this weekend — but “the use of adjectives and adverbs…that is not legal argument.”
The former FBI General Counsel and current political commentator and law professor, Weissman was responding to former President Donald Trump‘s ad hominem attack on social media, in which Trump described Weissmann as “deranged Jack” [Smith]’s “slimeball boss.”
"Adjectives and adverbs is not a way of arguing, especially for someone who had been the leader of the free world.”@AWeissmann_ responds to Trump’s attacks on him this week. pic.twitter.com/aOSd1UVNTC
— Inside with Jen Psaki (@InsideWithPsaki) January 7, 2024
Recognizing the comment’s intent — Trump’s unrelenting push to try his case(s) in the court of public opinion, rather than in federal court — Weissmann applies a standard of proof and evidence credibility in his assessment that the public opinion court isn’t obliged to consider.
The name-calling “is not a factual argument,” Weissmann asserts, “any more than if you say the election was stolen. You need to have facts.”
Weissmann disdains Trump’s strategy of hurling malignant characterizations of his opponents into the national dialogue, but he also disputes Trump’s innuendo on “the substance.”
Weissmann wonders aloud at Trump’s suggestion that “somehow I am Jack Smith’s boss. Again, where are the facts of that? I have had zero communications with Jack Smith or his team. They are independent, both within the Department of Justice and certainly for a legal analyst on MSNBC,” Weissmann says.
Weissmann, as his teaching bio at NYU reports, “served as a lead prosecutor in Robert S. Mueller’s Special Counsel’s Office (2017-19) and as Chief of the Fraud Section in the Department of Justice (2015-2019). From 2011 to 2013, Weissmann served as the General Counsel for the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”
