I can imagine Trump's lawyer using this defense in a bank robbery: "What is a demand note and money? There are just paper, just a few sheets of used paper. Most of it was printed before the COVID outbreak. How is using filthy old paper a crime?"

Slate: https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2024/04/trump-trial-update-opening-arguments-avoidance.html
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What was that case Blanche will be making on his client’s behalf? Blanche repeatedly reminded the jury that Trump is a former president and that he will refer to him as “President Trump” (and perhaps not the more customary “my client”) “out of respect for the office.”

Trump, though, isn’t just a former president. “He’s also a man; he’s a husband, he’s a father, he’s a person just like you and just like me,” Blanche added. The stuff of Clarence Darrow, this was not. Blanche continued with what would amount to the defense’s case: The prosecution’s documents charges are convoluted and not even truly criminal; the primary witnesses, Michael Cohen and Stormy Daniels, can’t be trusted; and this prosecution is for alleged crimes that are really old (most of the evidence, he informed jurors, was “from years and years ago, pre-COVID,” as if the pandemic offered a clean sheet, wiping out everyone’s crimes).

Blanche laid out exactly how Trump paid Cohen (for what the defense claims were legal services and prosecutors claim was a hush money reimbursement to Daniels), before indignantly declaring: “None of this was a crime.”

“What on earth is a crime? What is a crime about what I just described?” Blanche asked the jury, in reference to the various accounting procedures of the Trump Organization. “The 34 counts, ladies and gentleman, are literally just 34 pieces of paper.”
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