A legal expert pushed back on a conservative's claims that special counsel Jack Smith was politicizing Donald Trump's election interference case by dropping new evidence weeks before voters head to the polls.
U.S. District judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a 165-page filing that provides a narrative of Trump's efforts to undo his 2020 election loss, and she must now determine which of those actions should be considered official and thus covered by the Supreme Court's immunity ruling, and CNN panelists debated what impact the new evidence would have on November's election.
"People are aware of this," said former prosecutor Elliot Williams. "Supporters of Trump certainly aren't going to be persuaded by anything that Jack Smith puts on paper. Now there may be folks who are just tuning into American politics after four years, I don't know, but it's just hard to see where things move right now. Nothing's all that new in that."
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Meghan Hays, a former White House communications staffer for president Joe Biden, said the filing highlights the contrast between Trump and Kamala Harris, but Republican operative Matt Gorman questioned the timing of the release of that court filing.
"There's nothing that I see and say, 'Wow, that's a game changer,'" Gorman said. "I think, look, there is a reasonable argument to be made that you're 30 days before an election, like what what's going on here – what are the real motives? Like, even just little small details like, well, the fact they played the Village People 'YMCA' [as Trump exited his 'Stop the Steal' rally], not 'Hail To The Chief,' has presidential immunity connotations and consequences. It makes it a little, like, it makes it kind of funny."
Williams disagreed, saying the Supreme Court's lengthy delays in taking up the case and then issuing a ruling necessitated the timeline for Chutkan's handling of the case once it was returned to her.
"This whole, why are they doing this 30 days before – that is entirely a function of the Supreme Court's calendar," Williams said. "There was a direction from the judge to make this filing. It's not somehow that the narrative has got out that the Jack Smith dropped some bombshell 30 days before Election Day. That's simply not accurate. This came from the court, and it's a filing that's required to lay out the facts of the case."
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