Jack Smith just turned Trump's arguments 'on their heads' in new filing: legal expert
February 14, 2024
Special counsel Jack Smith not only dismantled former President Donald Trump's arguments for presidential immunity in his latest filing to the Supreme Court, argued legal expert Lisa Rubin on MSNBC's "The ReidOut" Wednesday — he used Trump's own arguments against him.
"You have been doggedly going through this filing," said anchor Joy Reid. "Give us more of what you've read thus far."
"You know, Joy, one of the things that strikes me in reading this is the way in which Jack Smith and his team so rapidly but also effectively subverted and turned on their heads some of the arguments that former President Trump and his lawyers were making," said Rubin. "One of the things that echoes throughout the briefs that former President Trump has submitted is a president is special. He should be treated specially and differently. And Jack Smith sort of doesn't disagree with that. He just takes a different tack at it."
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The angle Smith uses, said Rubin, is that "Yes, presidents are special. We endow them with all sorts of constitutional powers, including the power to take care that his powers are faithfully executed and to respect and venerate the Constitution, more than anyone else." And ultimately, she continues, Trump's alleged crimes are of "unparalleled gravity that necessitates trying this case as quickly as possible, not the delay that you are begging for."
"Another thing that I think he says that is really interesting, it's really what he doesn't say, former President Trump's brief to the Supreme Court was infused with references to his candidacy," Rubin continued. "Talked how he was the Republican frontrunner and indeed the leading candidate to be President of the United States. He talked about the fact that he had an interest in a stay because one of the groups that would be irreparably harmed from a trial would be his voters, his supporters who would be deprived of their First Amendment rights to associate with him and hear his political messages."
"And again, Jack Smith and his team turned that on their head," she added. "They say the public's interest in a speedy trial here is greater than any interest that Trump could have in delaying it, particularly given that what he is accused of doing here is subverting the democratic will of tens of millions of voters. In other words, you claim to stand for the interests of a certain segment of voters. But the accusations at the heart of this case are about your willingness to disenfranchise the tens of millions of people who never voted for you in the first instance."
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