Jack Smith 'outsmarted' Trump's Supreme Court in latest filing: Princeton historian

Princeton University historian Sean Wilentz believes that special counsel Jack Smith made a very savvy legal maneuver in his most recent filing in the Trump election subversion case.

Writing in The Atlantic, Wilentz makes the case that Smith did the best he could given the constraints imposed on him by what he describes as the Supreme Court's "shocking decision on July 1 to grant the presidency at least presumed immunity from criminal prosecution for all official acts."

Nonetheless, Wilentz believes Smith "outsmarted" the Supreme Court in the end.

"Smith’s filing tries to slice through the Court’s security shield regarding the insurrection," he wrote Monday. "Skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion, the filing demolishes the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity."

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Although Smith in his filing outwardly "respects the Court’s dubious ruling about the immunity of official presidential acts," he also "makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions whatsoever" and "persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself."

Wilentz then documents the new details that Smith added to his case, such as Trump shrugging off the danger Vice President Mike Pence found himself in after pro-Trump rioters broke into the Capitol and chanted for his hanging.

Even more forcefully, he argues, was Smith detailing how Trump's plans to illegally stay in power after losing an election dated back for months, such as his declaration at the 2020 Republican National Convention that "the only way they can take this election away from us is if this is a rigged election."

Read the full analysis here.