Andy McCarthy Says Latest Jack Smith Evidence Dump Could Taint Jury Pool Against Trump
'Her responsibly is to give Trump a fair trial'
Special counsel Jack Smith, appointed by the Biden-Harris administration’s Department of Justice, filed a superseding indictment against Republican presidential nominee and former President Donald Trump on Tuesday evening.
Legal professionals, including George Washington University law professor Jonathan Turley, former assistant U.S. attorney Andy McCarthy, and former federal prosecutor and former Trump attorney Jim Trusty, slammed Smith for the new indictment submitted in response to the Supreme Court’s July presidential immunity ruling.
'Going nowhere before the election.'
Smith’s latest legal action includes the same four charges he filed against Trump in the original indictment in August 2023 accusing the former president of federal election subversion in the 2020 presidential race. However, this revised indictment, handed down just 70 days before the upcoming election, attempts to address the Supreme Court’s ruling that declared presidents are entitled to immunity for official acts.
Trump is also facing three other separate indictments, including the New York criminal trial where he is awaiting sentencing slated for September, an alleged election interference case in Georgia that is stalled in the courts, and the classified documents case that United States District Judge Aileen Cannon threw out. Smith recently filed an appeal against Cannon’s decision.
Trusty told “CNN News Central” that Smith’s latest indictment could hit a “huge land mine” because it is attempting to “anticipate how the judge would rule on this official acts quandary.”
While the Supreme Court determined that Trump is immune from official acts, it did not outline what constitutes an unofficial versus official act, which will be left up to the lower courts to determine.
“So he’s anticipating that, but it’s really interesting because the opinion says, not just that immunized information is not properly before the court at trial, but that it contaminates the grand jury process. If you include that information in pursuing an indictment, that’s a huge land mine,” Trusty explained. “The problem is if he guesses wrong in one instance, like in other words, if he says, ‘oh, the president was consulting Mike Pence as president of the Senate, not as vice president,’ which is part of this new indictment, then if he gets it wrong once, he’s got the same problem.”
“He’s got to go back to the grand jury, re-indict for the third time based on this ruling coming from the Supreme Court. So it’s interesting, it’s taking the initiative, but it doesn’t necessarily make it a bulletproof indictment,” Trusty added.
Turley claimed that Smith has “always played right up the margin,” noting that “at times he has crossed over.”
“He was reversed by the U.S. Supreme Court on probably his previous most famous case because he stretched the law, and that has been a signature of his, and I think he’s still doing it,” Turley stated, referring to a case against former Virginia Republican Governor Robert McDonnell and his wife where the Supreme Court ultimately overruled the conviction.
McCarthy called the indictment against Trump “lawfare,” speculating that the case “is going nowhere before the election and I don’t think it’s going anywhere before we have a new president.”
He noted that regardless of the revised indictment, there is “still going to be a live immunity issue, which means Trump will be able to appeal to the D.C. circuit and the Supreme Court.”
Senator Rick Scott (R-Florida) told Newsmax on Wednesday that Smith’s new indictment is “just disgusting,” pointing to the fact that the charges were filed roughly two months before the election. He accused the Biden-Harris administration of using any means necessary to win the presidential race.
“This is complete election interference, and the American people need to wake up,” Scott said.
Trump responded Tuesday to Smith’s revised indictment on social media, arguing that “the whole case should be thrown out and dismissed on Presidential immunity grounds.”
He accused Smith of rewriting “the exact same case in an effort to circumvent the Supreme Court decision.”
Trump called Smith’s actions “shocking” and an “unprecedented abuse of the criminal justice system.”
“This is merely an attempt to INTERFERE WITH THE ELECTION, and distract the American People from the catastrophes Kamala Harris has inflicted on our Nation, like the Border Invasion, Migrant Crime, Rampant Inflation, the threat of World War III, and more,” Trump wrote.
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Former President Donald Trump is in the midst of multiple legal battles, but everything could change if the Supreme Court rules that he has full presidential immunity.
“The Court is a lot more concerned about the presidency than about Trump,” National Review contributing author Andrew McCarthy tells Glenn Beck.
“It’s an important point to make because a lot of the coverage has been this hysteria over whether the Trump-packed Supreme Court is in the tank for him and they’re going to get rid of Jack Smith’s prosecution,” McCarthy says. “I don’t think that’s going to happen at all.”
Rather, McCarthy believes that the court will send the case back to the trial judge in Washington “with instructions to sort out what things in the indictment against Trump are what you would call "official acts" that might arguably be immune from prosecution” and “what are private acts or private wrongs that he would not have immunity for.”
However, according to McCarthy, Trump’s lawyer has admitted that a lot of conduct charged in the indictment is considered private conduct that wouldn’t fall under an immunity claim.
“What are some of the acts that could fall under private?” Glenn asks, adding, “and what are the acts that are the president and you don’t prosecute?”
One of the “solid examples” McCarthy uses is that “Trump’s lawyer conceded that if Trump made a private scheme with private lawyers to get slates of electors designated for him and to supply documents to the Congress suggesting that they were the authentic, actual slate of electors designated by a state, that would be private conduct because it’s purely office-seeking.”
“On the other hand,” McCarthy explains, “there’s an allegation in the indictment that Trump tried to use the Justice Department to signal to states that there were serious concerns about fraud and considered both removing the attorney general when he got push back and considered sending a letter that they never sent from the Justice Department to the state of Georgia to tell them that they needed to do more scrutiny over what happened in the popular election.”
“Trump argues very strongly, and I think the court will probably go along with this, that is the president’s control over the Justice Department,” he says.
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