Published October 5, 2024
CNN’s Elie Honig isn’t Scott Jennings, but he’s also not going to play along with these laughable political games being carried out by the Department of Justice. Honig, a former assistant US Attorney, was aghast over the 165-page filing made by Special Counsel Jack Smith, which Katie covered:
U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan released a 165-page court document Wednesday afternoon filed by Special Counsel Jack Smith.
In it, Smith claims former President Donald Trump committed a number of crimes as a candidate on January 6, 2021 to stay in power after the 2020 presidential election. The new language and framing is an effort by federal prosecutors to get around the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling in June.
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” the document states. “Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”
The filing is a rewrite of Smith’s original January 6 case against Trump, which was forced by the Supreme Court decision on immunity.
And it’s election interference. Honig doesn’t say that but obliterates Smith in his recent column in New York Magazine. The ‘people have the right to know’ mantra has zero bearing in these proceedings. Honig mentioned that since that’s likely what some will argue regarding this atrocious protocol and institutional norms breach. CNN’s chief legal analyst does not hold back torching Smith for breaking the cardinal rule working at the DOJ: if one feels a legal filing could impact an election, you keep it in your pocket. The irony is that there is not only a procedural guide covering these scenarios, but former acting Attorney General Sally Yates was one of the most prominent voices in ensuring that principle was burned into the public’s memories.
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SOURCE: www.townhall.com
RELATED: Many of the tactics Jack Smith accused Trump of using to overturn the 2020 election are still in play for 2024
Special counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former President Donald Trump on August 1, 2023, in Washington, DC. Drew Angerer/Getty Images/File
Published October 5, 2024
The roadmap laid out by the Justice Department in court this week for how former President Donald Trump tried to overturn the 2020 election feels eerily familiar to many election officials and voting rights advocates who are gearing up for November.
In battleground states across the country, Republicans have worked aggressively to raise concerns about noncitizen voting (which experts say is rare in federal elections), to contest thousands of voters’ registrations and to challenge the once mundane process of certifying results.
They’ve filed an avalanche of pre-election lawsuits in swing states. And they’ve kept up a drumbeat of dubious claims about voting, along with the lie that the election was stolen in 2020.
“There are a number of parallels in the strategy we are seeing develop to what we saw in 2020,” said Sean Morales-Doyle, director for the Brennan Center’s voting rights program. “The election deniers’ playbook – the plan to subvert the outcome of the election – is more coordinated, it’s more planned out, it’s much more well-funded and sophisticated than it was in 2020.”
The details alleged in special counsel Jack Smith’s filing unsealed this week were ultimately part of an unsuccessful effort. But several of the strategies Trump and his allies deployed four years ago have been fine-tuned in 2024, raising fears that Republican activists and officials are actively laying the groundwork to contest the results again if Trump falls short.
“The attacks on voter eligibility, lies about immigrants and voting, also attacks on methods of voting,” said Hannah Fried, executive director of All Voting is Local. “These are about laying groundwork for challenging results.”
A Trump campaign spokesperson pointed to the campaign’s released comment slamming the Smith filing, which called it “falsehood-ridden” and an attempt to “interfere in this election.”
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SOURCE: www.edition.cnn.com
