Trump's legal team better be able to get him to plead insanity at trial, a Harvard law professor says

• A Harvard law professor said Trump's lawyers should consider having him plead insanity at a trial.
• The professor, Laurence Tribe, was commenting on Trump's response to the House's January 6 panel.

A Harvard law professor suggested that former President Donald Trump's legal team should get him to plead insanity if he goes on trial.

In a tweet on Sunday, the professor, Laurence Tribe, an expert on constitutional law, commented on Trump's video message to the House select committee on January 6, 2021.

"If this is the 'defense' at Trump's forthcoming trial, I don't envy the lawyers who agree to represent him," Tribe tweeted.

"They'd better be psychiatrists expert at reflexive projection and capable of getting their client to plead insanity," Tribe added.

Tribe was responding to Trump's rambling rebuttal to the committee posted on Truth Social on Friday, the day after the House panel released its 845-page report containing revelations about the former president's role before and during the Capitol riot.

In the video, Trump called the committee members "very bad people" while repeating baseless voter-fraud conspiracy theories. Trump also claimed the panel "did not produce a single shred of evidence" that he "in any way intended or wanted violence at our Capitol."

Tribe is not the first person to suggest Trump consider an insanity defense. In October, Neal Katyal, a former Justice Department official, made a similar comment while weighing in on Trump's 14-page response — which contained baseless claims of election fraud — to the House select committee's intention to subpoena him.

"I can't see it in any legal way helping him unless he is trying to go for the insanity defense, of which this paper seems, you know, to be some evidence of," Katyal told the MSNBC host Jonathan Capehart.

On December 19, the House panel investigating the Capitol riot asked the Justice Department to prosecute Trump on four charges: conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy to make false statements, obstruction of an official proceeding, and inciting an insurrection. Trump said in a Truth Social post that day that he felt the move made him "stronger."

Tribe and a spokesman for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider's requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.