New Jack Smith filing accuses Trump's lawyer of rule violation: Mueller prosecutor

The big news from Jack Smith today was the unsealing of a request from the special counsel to put a narrow gag order on former president Donald Trump in his criminal elections case in D.C. But buried inside that request was something else, according to former top Mueller prosecutor Andrew Weissmann's account.

The gag order request is the most recent development in the criminal action against Trump, coming just after Trump asked Judge Chutkan to recuse herself from the case due to the potential appearance of a bias. Last month, legal experts suggested that Trump's lawyer John Lauro in the Washington D.C.-based election conspiracy case may have already violated a criminal rule in that jurisdiction.

Weissmann, also the co-host of MSNBC podcast "Prosecuting Donald Trump," said on Friday that Smith's new DC filing makes that exact same accusation.

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The new document "accuses Trump's DC counsel (Lauro) of violating the local rule about making public statements about the case; those statements were indeed a direct violation of Local Criminal Rule 57," according to Weissmann.

He then summarized from the court filing:

"Lead counsel 'violated Local Criminal Rule 57.7(b),' which prohibits attorneys from releasing public extrajudicial statements regarding, among other things, 'the identity, testimony, or credibility of prospective witnesses' and the 'merits of the case or the evidence in the case.'"