The narrative laid out in special counsel Jack Smith's latest filing in the Jan. 6 case should disqualify Donald Trump from holding elected office ever again, according to a former federal prosecutor.
U.S. District judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the 165-page filing in which Smith's office describes the former president's pressure campaign on then-vice president Mike Pence and other Republicans around the country as he sought to overturn his election loss, and now the court must determine which of those should be immune from prosecution after the Supreme Court granted him immunity for official acts.
"The Supreme Court [required] Jack Smith to truncate his proof," former prosecutor Andrew Weissmann told MSNBC's "Morning Joe," "to only use witnesses who are private witnesses or people in public office but acting in a private capacity as a candidate, even with that limitation, that you can't use any evidence from people who are acting in an official capacity at the White House or elsewhere, this is sort of body blow after body blow with really shocking evidence."
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"I am old enough to remember Watergate, which was a scandal about cheating and trying to find out what it is your opponent knew through illegal means and covering that up," Weissmann added. "This is so much worse. It lays out an effort to undermine and thwart the votes of millions and millions of people just to stay in office, and the evidence is coming from Donald Trump's own people, his own lawyers, his own campaign staff, and, most notably, his own vice president, who had every incentive to want to win that election but decided to act out of principle and follow the rule of law."
Richard Nixon, of course, resigned in August 1974 rather than face impeachment for Watergate, which resulted in 69 indictments and 48 convictions, including some high-ranking administration officials, but the Republican-led Senate refused to convict Trump in his 2021 impeachment trial after the Democratic-led House voted to impeach him for Jan. 6.
"This is a read that is so graphic, so devastating, and so dispiriting," Weissmann concluded, "that this is where the country is, when these allegations are the kind of thing that the normal laws of gravity would have people understanding that this person should never be in office again, based on this really detailed show of the facts around what Donald Trump did."
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