Special counsel Jack Smith included a “really important evidentiary nugget” against former President Donald Trump, according to legal analyst Glenn Kirschner on Saturday.
Smith is the official appointed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) and U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland to oversee all federal investigations pertaining to Trump. So far, this has included his criminal indictment for alleged mishandling of classified documents after leaving the White House in 2021 and, more notably, a criminal indictment for his alleged efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election that led to the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot. Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has maintained his innocence and has denied any wrongdoing.
Last week, Smith’s team filed a request with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the Trump election interference case, asking that they be allowed to present certain evidence pertaining to the case to a Washington, D.C., jury. Among this evidence, Politico reported, are examples of Trump’s past comments denigrating the integrity of the 2012 and 2016 U.S. presidential elections. Trump ran in 2012, but opted out of seeking the Republican nomination in 2011, later denigrating the general election results after Barack Obama’s victory over Mitt Romney. Though he won the 2016 election, he still later claimed that voter fraud had cost him the popular vote to Hillary Clinton.
“They demonstrate the defendant’s common plan of falsely blaming fraud for election results he does not like,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in the filing.
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Appearing on MSNBC’s The Saturday Show with Jonathan Capehart, Kirschner, a veteran former federal prosecutor and outspoken Trump critic, discussed the importance of this new filing with Capehart, stressing how it indicates the scale of Smith’s intentions.
“He’s going big, he’s going broad, he’s going sweeping,” Kirschner said. “In this new court filing from Jack Smith, he indicates, we’re going to introduce statements that Donald Trump made indicating his knowledge, his intent, his plan, by trying to badmouth and undermine the confidence that the American people have in the electoral process generally. He’s been doing this since at least back in 2012.”
Kirschner also highlighted a “really important evidentiary nugget” included in the filing that mentioned two unnamed Trump campaign operatives “on the ground” in Detroit during the 2020 election, one of whom was described as a “Trump co-conspirator.”
As alleged by Smith and his team, these two operatives were texting about the vote counting after Election Day 2020 and suggested that they needed to, as Kirschner summed it up, “start a riot” as the results began to trend in Joe Biden’s favor.
“Those are co-conspirator statements, and the law regarding the admissibility of co-conspirator statements says, if you’re in the conspiracy, every statement made by every other co-conspirator is admissible as incriminating evidence against you,” Kirschner explained.
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s team and other legal experts via email for comment.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.