December 27, 2023
“The Court should not permit the defendant to turn the courtroom into a forum in which he propagates irrelevant disinformation, and should reject his attempt to inject politics into this proceeding.”
I’m going to give you one guess as to who this is about.
If you guessed former President Donald Trump – you’d be exactly right. Special Counsel Jack Smith filed this 20-page motion in Trump’s federal criminal election interference case this morning.
He’s asking the judge to put some guardrails on what trump and his legal team can argue and bring up in court. Now – before you start freaking out this is absolutely standard. You should know that in any legal proceeding in this country there are pretrial motions and hearings where both sides and the judge decide which evidence can be admitted in front of the jury and what can and cannot be said in front of them. So this is filing is the special counsel’s wish list. But it doesn’t mean this is exactly what he’s going to get. This is just what he wants the judge to consider.
He wants the judge to exclude evidence and arguments made by the former President claiming things like – this prosecution and trial are interfering with his political activities.
Smith wants the judge to prohibit Trump and his team from arguing that this prosecution or the grand jury’s findings of probable cause were directed by President Biden as a form of election interference. Smith says that’s not accurate and irrelevant to the prosecution, therefore the jury should not hear it.
He wants the judge to prohibit Trump and his legal team from arguing this all a witch hunt and the prosecution is an example of government misconduct.
Smith is asking the judge to prohibit Trump’s team from arguing to the jury that others are to blame for January 6th including law enforcement, Washington DC’s mayor, military forces, unidentified secret agents or foreign influencers.
Now – the former president’s team will file their own response to this and the judge will eventually rule.
I say eventually because as of right now – all of the pretrial hearings in this election interference case are on hold while the appeals court decides whether trump can even be prosecuted because of what he says is his “absolute immunity” from criminal prosecution because he was president at the time of these alleged crimes. The appeals court will be hearing oral arguments in that case in a few weeks.
Read the filing from Special Counsel Jack Smith here.
