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Jack Smith Seeks To Have Parts Of Trump Filing Made Public

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OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.


Special Counsel Jack Smith continues his quest to get former President Donald Trump and if he cannot do it in court he wants to do it in the court of public opinion.

The special counsel wants to publish “substantive” information from witnesses his election interference case against the former president for the public to see.

The version would redact the names of all witnesses other than former Vice President Mike Pence, ABC News reported.

It comes a day after Smith filed a private brief in which he said presidential immunity should not be extended to the former president.

“The public’s interest is fully vindicated by accessing the substantive material in the Government’s filing,” he said.

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“The unredacted substance of what a witness said is more important, for purposes of public access, than the redacted identity of the specific person who said it,” he said.

The information would presumably contain information obtained from search warrants, witnesses and grand jury testimony with names redacted.

The judge handling the case, U.S District Judge Tanya Chutkan, gave the former president’s attorneys until Tuesday to file objections to the request and gave prosecutors until Oct. 10 to file their response.

Smith could be grasping at straws and getting desperate to convict Trump, according to a noted legal mind.

That is the opinion of scholar and Harvard law professor emeritus Alan Dershowitz, who said that he will not get the former president convicted.

He said that Smith is going to have an “uphill battle” with his new Washington DC indictment because it will be tough to prove that Trump believed he was defeated by Joe Biden in 2020.

“The indictment charges that Donald Trump knew, knew, and believed that he had actually lost the election. How’s the government gonna prove that?” he said. “He never said that to anybody. He never wrote that anywhere. Did he ever think it? I don’t know. Did he say it on a phone call that was illegally overheard? I doubt it.”

“I have spoken to President Trump about this. I think he’s wrong. I think he lost the election, fair and square. Now I’m not talking about the influence of Russia and all kinds of things external, but in terms of the counting of votes, that’s just what I’m talking about now. I think he lost Georgia, I think he lost Arizona and I think he lost enough states so that Joe Biden was officially and correctly elected president of the United States,” the legal scholar said.

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“It’s not a crime to disbelieve that, in fact, the indictment says that it’s not a crime to speak about that and to oppose it, but if he believed it, if he honestly believed it, if he talked himself into it, even if he was wrong, if he believed it if he thought he had won the election, then everything he’s accused of doing is protected by the First Amendment, Article Two of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment,” he said.

He said that if the former president really believed that he had not been defeated his case would be comparable to other famous people who have challenged election results, like former Vice President Al Gore in 2000.

“I think it’s an uphill fight for the prosecution to win this case. Now they will win it, it’s not uphill in the District of Columbia. They could have indicted him, for you know, eating a salami sandwich and a jury in the District of Columbia will convict,” he said. “We’ll wait and see what the instructions are, whether the instructions require the jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt based on evidence not based on surmise but based on hard evidence that Donald Trump actually knew and believed that he had lost the election and he just was lying.”

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