Jack Smith is back in the conversation for the 2024 Election.
He took a big risk with his latest gambit.
And Jack Smith made a bad mistake that is going to come back to haunt him.
Jack Smith’s January 6 case is on shaky ground
Special Counsel Jack Smith has had his criminal case against former President Donald Trump over January 6 paused for most of the year while a legal battle played out over Presidential immunity.
The Supreme Court ruled in July that Presidents have absolute immunity from criminal prosecutions for official acts while in office.
But the Justices left it up to lower courts to determine what constitutes an official act by a President.
Smith filed a superseding indictment for the four charges he brought against Trump, which removed portions that were covered by the Supreme Court’s Presidential immunity ruling.
The Special Counsel is ready to move full steam ahead with the case, but he’s facing one major problem that could sink it.
Former Harvard Law professor Alan Dershowitz said that one part of Smith’s case would be almost impossible to prove.
Dershowitz argued that Smith has an “uphill fight” to prove that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 Election.
“The indictment charges that Donald Trump knew, knew and believed that he had actually lost the election. How’s the government gonna prove that?” Dershowitz asked. “He never said that to anybody. He never wrote that anywhere. Did he ever think it? I don’t know. Did he say it on a phone call that was illegally overheard? I doubt it.”
Challenging an election isn’t a crime
Dershowitz explained that Smith’s entire case hinges on Trump knowing that he had lost the election.
“It’s not a crime to disbelieve that, in fact, the indictment says that it’s not a crime to speak about that and to oppose it, but if he believed it, if he honestly believed it, if he talked himself into it, even if he was wrong, if he believed it if he thought he had won the election, then everything he’s accused of doing is protected by the First Amendment, Article Two of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment,” Dershowitz stated.
He said that Trump’s actions were no different than what former Vice President Al Gore did in the 2000 Election against former President George W. Bush or the most disputed election in American history involving Rutherford B. Hayes and Samuel Tilden in 1876.
“I think it’s an uphill fight for the prosecution to win this case. Now they will win it, it’s not uphill in the District of Columbia. They could have indicted him, for you know, eating a salami sandwich and a jury in the District of Columbia will convict,” Dershowitz explained. “We’ll wait and see what the instructions are, whether the instructions require the jury to find beyond a reasonable doubt based on evidence not based on surmise but based on hard evidence that Donald Trump actually knew and believed that he had lost the election and he just was lying.”
Smith is banking on having a stacked deck in Washington, D.C. with an Obama-appointed judge.
But trying to prove the unprovable could ultimately sink his case.
Informed American will keep you up-to-date on any developments to this ongoing story.
