'Jack Smith is going to come out swinging': Trump warned he's about to be hit hard
July 02, 2024
After the U.S. Supreme Court issued its Monday ruling protecting Donald Trump from some of the charges brought by special counsel Jack Smith related to the 2020 election, legal analysts predict it is still possible to have some hearings before the election.
Speaking to MSNBC on Tuesday, former federal prosecutor Kristy Greenberg and legal analyst Anthony Coley said that, despite the timeline challenges with motions, an evidentiary hearing could expose a lot of information against Trump for the public.
At the same time, Greenberg said that Trump faces a timeline problem in a number of cases he thinks he can overturn or eliminate entirely.
The hush money case in which he was convicted of 34 criminal charges, for example, took place before Trump was president, but he is still pressing to have the verdict dismissed.
The legal experts argued that the cases that Smith is overseeing — the election interference case and the classified documents one — are not dead either.
"One, it should happen before the election," said Greenberg, though she said it as more of a demand than with anticipation. "Jack Smith should get moving."
"Two, I think it should be very illuminating. I think he should hold nothing back," she encouraged Smith.
"There are four buckets of conduct that are still very much on the table. And frankly, it was very surprising that the Supreme Court didn't just say it is private conduct. You got the conversations between former President Trump and Mike Pence, which are about his role, not as an executive branch function, but as the vice president of the senate and the certification of counting electoral votes."
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Host Katy Tur interrupted, saying that she thought the court specifically excluded that piece of evidence, calling it presumed immunity.
"But even in the opinion, the Supreme Court says the president has no role whatsoever in that process," Greenberg explained.
An argument can be made that there is no way to hurt executive authority, she said, which is the test that the Court outlined in its decision.
"Then you go to his conversations with private parties, state officials, and none of that, again, deals with," Greenberg continued. "The president doesn't have any role with how the states decide their electors.
"So, I think Jack Smith is going to come out swinging here," she predicted. "I think he's going to present witnesses, present documentary evidence, and all of that part of the Supreme Court opinion that deals with, well, the evidence can't come in if it is official, that does not apply to an evidentiary hearing, that applies to a trial."
"Loose rules and evidentiary rules apply to hearings," Greenberg also said. "So, we should get to see a mini-trial here. We should get to see the evidence before the election, and the American people should learn what happened."
Coley said that the timing is the most important part. "These are not one or two days of hearings," he continued. "We're talking multiple days over weeks and very likely soon after Labor Day." It means there is a possibility of having some semblance of a "trial" before the election.
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