Former President Donald Trump‘s Tuesday filing to limit the amount of evidence to be publicized in his 2020 election subversion case brought by special counsel Jack Smith made presiding U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan‘s job “much easier” given its “unpersuasive” nature, according to former U.S. assistant attorney Glenn Kirschner.
Kirschner, an MSNBC legal analyst and frequent Trump critic, wrote in an opinion piece that Trump’s lawyers’ filing earlier this week objecting to the special counsel’s redactions before the brief was to be made public had “backfired,” as a similar version was unsealed to the public yesterday.
Last week, Smith, who is leading the prosecution against Trump on four counts related to alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results leading up to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol, filed a sealed brief outlining the charges against Trump within the Supreme Court‘s July 1 presidential immunity ruling framework.
Trump is accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction and attempted obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights in connection with an alleged pressure campaign on state officials to reverse the 2020 election results.
The former president has denied all charges and repeatedly said he is the victim of a political witch hunt. Trump has accused Smith of attempting to interfere in the 2024 presidential election by prosecuting him. The election, in which Trump is the Republican nominee, is 32 days away.
Kirschner called Trump’s lawyers’ objection on Tuesday “absurd in the extreme” in both argument and tone, referencing their description of the brief as a “politically motivated manifesto to be public.”
Former President Donald Trump’s attorneys Emil Bove (L) and Todd Blanche (R) in Washington, D.C., on September 5. On Wednesday, special counsel Jack Smith’s redacted brief was unsealed and available to the public.
AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana
Newsweek reached out to Trump’s legal team for comment via email on Thursday.
Kirschner wrote that their arguments regarding which information should be publicly disclosed in two of Trump’s legal cases and the reasoning behind those decisions are flawed, describing them as “empty allegations of hypocrisy.”
Regarding the third argument in the Tuesday filing, Kirschner said it was “simply laughable.”
“On the upside, Trump’s new court filing made Chutkan’s job much easier. It was so unpersuasive that Chutkan simply set it aside, concluded that Smith’s proposed redactions struck the right balance and ordered his motion to be filed on the public record so she can move on to the litigation the Supreme Court has directed her to oversee,” Kirschner wrote.
On Wednesday, Smith’s 165-page motion with redactions was unsealed. In it, Smith makes the case that Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office” following the 2020 election and that his efforts to overturn the results are not protected by presidential immunity because “the defendant was acting in his capacity as a candidate for reelection, not in his capacity as President.”
That afternoon, Trump responded to the filing in a Truth Social post, writing: “The release of this falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional, J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz‘s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the Most Important Election in the History of our Country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and Weaponize American Democracy, and INTERFERE IN THE 2024 PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION.”
Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris are in a tight race for the White House, with polls showing a slight lead for Harris a little over a month before Election Day.
