If Judge Aileen Cannon proves to be a problem Jack Smith could consider a New Jersey trial: legal expert
Former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissmann pointed to a few things that he found missing in the federal indictment of Donald Trump. One of those could say a lot about a plan B for special counsel Jack Smith.
"I think there are two things that are not in the indictment that were notable," he said on MSNBC Tuesday.
"One is that ...this is a subset of the secret or top secret documents that I think that's something we will not see more of because that is probably the intelligence community saying there are things so sensitive we do not want you to use that in court. The material in the indictment is shocking. You can imagine what was left out.
"The second thing that is notable to me is how little was said about Bedminster. The charges go up to the period of the search in Mar-a-Lago. And there are even references to boxes being taken to Bedminster. But given the amount of detail, just the granularity of what happened at Mar-a-Lago, and that Jack Smith is such a meticulous prosecutor, it was notable to me there was a gap in terms of what was happening at Bedminster."
There was a recent report that Trump spoke with Mark Meadows' ghostwriters at his club in Bedmister, NJ, in a taped conversation in which the former president waved around, or pretended to wave around, classified documents. Smith reportedly has that information, but it isn't mentioned in the indictment either.
"The two instances of actual dissemination that are charged in terms of — I would say, charges that are alleged to have happened, but in Bedminster. But those are not separately charged," said Weissmann. "There is a dissemination charge that could have been brought. But it was not brought. And one of the things people speculate about is that because of the venue, the location for those charges was Bedminster, which is in New Jersey. So is there more to come?"
MSNBC host Katy Tur asked if he thought it meant possible charges in New Jersey federal court.
"I don't know," Weissmann confessed. "But, you know, one of the things — I'm Jack Smith, and I'm thinking I may get [Judge] Aileen Cannon in Florida, and she puts things off, there is no question that that could be the basis. In other words, there are dissemination charges that seem to from the current charges, seem to be something that could be brought in New Jersey."
See the comments from Weissmann in the video below or at the link here.
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