'Hiding in plain sight?' Legal expert reveals hunch after Jack Smith's massive filing

A deep dive into special counsel Jack Smith’s massive legal filing that exposed new evidence in Donald Trump's election subversion case reveals the legal strategy behind the prosecution of the former president and the possibility of a key government witness – former Vice President Mike Pence.

MSNBC legal correspondent Lisa Rubin noted in an analysis published Friday that while the exhibits to Smith’s immunity brief remain under wraps, “snippets of witness statements give clues about his litigation strategy if the federal election interference case survives.”

Alternating between playing it safe and taking risks is what Rubin, a former litigator, said she gleaned of Smith's likely approach at trial after poring over the 1,889 pages released by Judge Tanya Chutkan Friday.

She found that the first volume “of 720-plus pages is excerpted testimony and interviews from the House Jan. 6 committee’s investigation.” She went on to list in alphabetical order the officials and campaign staffers whose interviews are included in the filing.

“What’s most interesting about this group collectively — but also advisable in the wake of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling — is that the vast majority of these witnesses were not executive branch employees, but instead were private citizens, campaign staff or state officials Trump tried to influence,” Rubin wrote for MSNBC.

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She added, tellingly: “But, of course, those are just the witnesses whose statements we can see. And while Volume 3 of the appendix contains the cover and several highlighted pages from Pence’s book 'So Help Me God,' actual testimony from Pence is nowhere to be found. Or is it merely hiding in plain sight?”

Rubin said the bombshell legal filing has nearly “100 pages of fully sealed material between the apparent end of the excerpt of” former Trump senior campaign adviser Jason Miller and then-adviser Katrina Pierson.

“And alphabetically, what, or rather who, falls between them? Pence,” she wrote.

Reading between the lines, Rubin said she believes Smith “has ample testimony from Pence about his many post-election conversations with Trump about its outcome — and whether either of them had any reason to doubt or try to change it.”

While that could pose legal troubles for Trump, according to Rubin, “the bigger determining factor seems to be the outcome of this election.”