Jack Smith

Special counsel Jack Smith's search warrant for former President Donald Trump's Twitter account could be an essential piece of the puzzle to prove his intent in the 2020 election investigation, legal experts told Salon's Areeba Shah in an analysis published Thursday.

Atlanta trial attorney Ted Spaulding told Salon, "Getting access to [Trump's] Twitter account could be hugely beneficial to the prosecution. They are looking for evidence of Trump's mindset leading up to Jan. 6 to prove intent to commit a crime. That is normally very hard to prove because you cannot really get into the mind of the accused."

Special counsel Jack Smith's office has proposed a trial of no more than six weeks starting Jan. 2, 2024, in the election conspiracy case against former President Donald Trump.

In a motion filed on Thursday, the Department of Justice said it expected the trial to take four to six weeks.

Former RNC staffer Justin Higgins this week claimed to progressive podcaster Aaron Rupar that the GOP uses right-wing media to simply create bogus stories out of absolutely nothing.

While discussing the spin being placed by Fox News pundits on special counsel Jack Smith's indictment of former President Donald Trump, Rupar argued that Fox is claiming that Smith is prosecuting Trump solely for exercising his First Amendment rights under the United States Constitution – despite the fact that Smith specifically says in his indictment that this is not the case.

Legal scholar and Harvard University Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe on Tuesday detailed how a lawyer for Donald Trump “completely misused” and “grossly [misrepresented]” his work in a memorandum purporting to proved a legal framework for the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Trump last week was indicted on four felony counts related to those efforts.

Tribe’s breakdown of the Nov. 18, 2020 Memorandum, written by attorney Kenneth Chesebro (or “co-conspirator 5,” according to special counsel Jack Smith), was published in Just Security one day before the New York Times revealed the existence of a Dec. 6, 2020 internal campaign memo that Department of Justice prosecutors “are portraying as a crucial link in how the Trump team’s efforts evolved into a criminal conspiracy.”

The Nov. 18 memo, entitled “The Real Deadline for Settling a State’s Electoral Votes,” is the first in a series of documents that the special counsel laid out in his indictment of Trump, and, Tribe claims, “ relied on a gross misrepresentation” of the constitutional scholar’s work.

“As the title of the November 18 Memorandum indicates, Chesebro focuses on what he considers the ‘real deadline’ under the federal scheme for presidential election,” Tribe wrote. “In the body of the Memorandum, [Chesebro] quotes me completely out of context.”

The constitutional law professor claims Chesebro’s memo “grossly misrepresents what I wrote in my constitutional law treatise on the power of one Congress, through legislation, to bind a future Congress’s ability to pass new legislation,” accusing the Trump lawyer of flipping his conclusion “on its head” and “citing [his] work in support of the very opposite conclusion.”