Within the first 48 hours of Donald Trump's latest indictment, on federal charges related to his attempted coup after the 2020 election, the number of Republican excuses for his crimes rivaled the number of votes he demanded Georgia election officials fabricate to steal the election. (Which was 11,780, for those whose memory needs refreshing.) In the true spirit of competitive GOP hackery, each "defense" was dumber than the last.
There were claims that "free speech" provides Trump blanket immunity for conspiring to overturn an election, on the grounds that most conspiring is done with vocal cords. As a Georgia State University law professor, Anthony Michael Kreis, told Salon, "A person cannot walk into a bank and say, 'stick 'em up,' and then cling to the First Amendment's protections." Similarly, it's not "free speech" when Trump told people to commit crimes for him, simply because he used his mouth to do so. Even Trump's former attorney general, Bill Barr, dismissed this gambit by saying, "free speech doesn't give you the right to engage in a fraudulent conspiracy." As Barr pointed out, no conspiracy charge could stick if the "conspiring" part was excluded from evidence.
