Special counsel Jack Smith “bent ordinary procedure” to kneecap former President Trump after he failed to try the candidate before the November election, a legal analyst argued in a piece for New York Magazine.
In Thursday’s “Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot” essay, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig analyzed Smith’s decision to drop a 165-page federal court filing related to the issue of Trump’s immunity from prosecution.
According to Honig, Smith successfully received permission from Judge Tanya Chutkan to file a 180-page long brief—four times the normal maximum.
Honig noted that Chutkan now claims she does not care about the upcoming election despite earlier efforts to expedite Trump’s immunity and get it in before November 5. After redacting several names, she complied with Smith’s request and made the rest of the brief public.
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Special Counsel Jack Smith delivers remarks on a recently unsealed indictment including four felony counts against former U.S. President Donald Trump at the Justice Department on August 1, 2023 in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong/Getty Images)
“The larger, if less obvious, headline is that Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he’ll bend any rule, switch up on any practice — so long as he gets to chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects. At this point, there’s simply no defending Smith’s conduct on any sort of principled or institutional basis,” Honig wrote.
He added that Smith’s “unprincipled, norm-breaking practice” is neither a response nor an excuse to suggestions that voters should have the utmost information about presidential candidates before they cast their ballot.
In standard criminal procedure and under federal rules, a prosecutor first files an indictment, the defense makes a motion and then the prosecution responds to said motions. However, Honig said Smith turned these rules “on their head” when he asked Chutkan to file without a pending defense motion.
“Trump’s team objected, and the judge acknowledged that Smith’s request to file first was ‘procedurally irregular’ — moments before she ruled in Smith’s favor, as she’s done at virtually every consequential turn,” Honig continued.
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Former President Donald Trump speaks at the U.S.-Mexico border on August 22, 2024 south of Sierra Vista, Arizona. (Rebecca Noble)
He stressed that Smith’s proactive filing is “prejudicial” to Trump in the legal and political sense, but also ironic because Smith previously complained that Trump’s words might taint the jury pool for the case.
Now, Smith is using grand-jury testimony, which often remains hidden at this stage of a case, and has drafted a massive document that “contains all manner of damaging statements about a criminal defendant, made outside of a trial setting and without being subjected to the rules of evidence or cross-examination.”
Honig also claimed that Smith’s conduct violates core Department of Justice (DOJ) principles and policy.
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In his words, “If prosecutors bend their principles depending on the identity of their prey, then they’ve got no principles at all.”
In the unsealed filing, Smith told the court that Trump is not immune from the remaining allegations against him and laid out his case for why Trump “must stand trial for his private crimes.”
Fox News Digital reached out to the Justice Department for comment.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him by Smith.