'Skilled fighter' Jack Smith delivered a Trump indictment that's 'built for speed': legal expert

Former Presidnt Donald Trump's legal trouble spiked when U.S. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith hit the MAGA 2024 hopeful with his third indictment on August 1.

Smith charged the former president on four counts alleging "that Trump, after losing the 2020 presidential election to now-President Joe Biden, egregiously violated federal law in order to stay in power."

In an op-ed published by The Independent on Monday, legal expert Harry Litman argues "the odds that the county will be able to know the verdict on Trump's alleged crimes before the" 2024 presidential "election has increased dramatically," suggesting "Whether you're pro, con, or undecided on Trump, that is a good thing for the democratic process."

READ MORE: 'Read it in full': Jack Smith announces charges against Donald Trump

Calling Smith "a skilled fighter who knows how to analyze his adversary's vulnerabilities," Litman offers a few ways "Smith has acted with careful attention to Trump's qualities and weaknesses."

Litman writes:

First and foremost, Smith's indictment is built for speed. The most important feature of the charging document is the caption: USA versus Donald Trump, and nothing more. The indictment reveals that there were six co-conspirators for Trump’'s crimes. It might have been expected that they too would be charged; Smith avoided that path, realizing that notwithstanding its upsides, it would multiply the potential for delay.

The legal expert continues:

Second, Smith skillfully anticipated Trump's chief defenses and tacked around them in the indictment. He included a paragraph early in the charging document specifically acknowledging Trump's right to political speech. The conduct he chose to charge carves off the notorious speech on the ellipse. That speech plainly incited much of the melee on January 6, but it also raised nettlesome legal issues of political speech that Smith wisely chose to finesse.

Furthermore, Litman points out Smith has "a certain kind of upper hand" after informing the court of Trump's recent "outrageous social message" where the former president declared "in all caps, if you go after me I'm coming after you."

Litman concludes that in crafting "an indictment that discerns Trump's broader political strategy and looks to neutralize it," the special counsel "is the very antithesis of a generic prosecutor: he has sussed out his quarry as meticulously as Ahab sussed out the white whale."