'Dead loser': Legal experts slam Trump's latest argument against Jack Smith

What’s worse than a dead loser, comparable to a long-dead stinking corpse, and worthy of an Academy Award?

The winner, according to legal experts, is Donald Trump’s motion to hold Special Counsel Jack Smith in contempt.

“This motion deserves an Oscar for pretending to be a legal argument,” legal scholar Laurence Tribe wrote Thursday. “It’s a long-dead stinking corpse. The lawyers who signed it should be sanctioned for pretending to practice law.”

Tribe was replying to MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissmann, who was equally charmed by Trump’s argument against the prosecutor who has charged him with corruptly attempting to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

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“This latest Trump motion to Judge Chutkan is a dead loser,” Weissmann wrote. “This is filed to play to his political audience solely, like much of his legal briefs.”

These astute legal assessments follow Trump’s attorneys' demand to Judge Tanya Chutkan that she sanction Smith.

The 15-page filing accuses Smith of defying court orders pausing a federal court stay on the case until Trump’s presidential immunity claim is decided.

Trump’s attorneys argue Smith violated that stay when he filed a motion seeking to bar Trump from making partisan political arguments in his trial.

“The prosecutors seek to weaponize the Stay to spread political propaganda," the motion reads, "knowing that President Trump would not fully respond because the Court relieved him of the burdens of litigation during the Stay."

But former federal prosecutor Michael Zeldin argues Smith’s actions were allowable because they didn’t require a response from Trump’s legal team, and resorted to playground, rather than battleground, imagery to describe them.

“It is really sort of a sand box in a sense; they're putting the stuff in there and when the kids are allowed to play again, the stuff will be all there and ready to go,” Zeldin said on MSNBC Thursday.

“Smith is not buying into the notion that ‘I have to put everything on hold until this is all done,'” Zeldin added. "‘I can get everything ready to go so that if the case is ready to go, it is ready to go.’”

If Zeldin differed with Tribe on one point, it was that he’d probably grant the motion a Tony instead of an Oscar.

“These lawyers know better than this, but they're trying to poison the public perception,” Zeldin said. “I think it is political theater.”

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