Jack Smith must prove two big things to put away Trump for January 6: legal expert

Jack Smith has to prove two specific things to a jury in Washington, D.C., in order to send former President Donald Trump to prison for the January 6 attack, former solicitor general Neal Katyal explained in a panel on MSNBC Tuesday.

This comes after Smith's grand jury issued a four-count indictment against the former president, on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy against rights, and two counts of witness tampering.

"What I've taken from it so far is that this indictment ... it seems to me that one of the things that this indictment is doing is being very careful to detail all of the ways in which Donald Trump was told he lost the elections in all of the key states that he wanted to contest," said anchor Joy Reid. "And his insistence on tweeting and insisting and lying about those elections one by one by one by one. Why do you think it was so important to do that for so many pages in this indictment?"

"Yeah, so it's a shouting indictment, Joy," said Katyal, calling it "one of, if not the, most significant case in the United States history ... up there with Dred Scott, up there with Brown v. Board of Education. This goes to the essential question of who we are as a people: do we let someone, the president, act in this way?"

Smith, Katyal explained, "has to do two things" to convince a 12-person jury under the high standard of reasonable doubt that the former president is guilty.

"He has to prove, one, that Donald Trump committed a bad criminal act, that he conspired, he agreed to try and overturn the election, to interfere with the election results to obstruct the counting of the votes on January 6th, one of our most solemn days. That's number one," said Katyal. "Number two, Smith has to prove that Donald Trump did that with a bad criminal intent, that he didn't do it because he thought he won the election, but rather the contrary."

The indictment, Katyal added, signals how Smith plans to do just that.

"It's page after page of damning fact after fact," said Katyal, noting that the case is also assigned to Judge Tanya Chutkan, an Obama-appointed judge renowned for her prosecutorial background and fair-minded approach. "The 45 pages will be aired out before a court and a jury. If I'm Donald Trump right now, he's got away with a lot of things in his life but this is karma coming to roost."

Watch the video below or at the link here.

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