"Deranged Jack Smith is fighting for Lyin’ Kamala. LOST BIG IN FLORIDA! Justice Department is a political weapon. Never happened in USA before! MAGA2024."

Trump reacts — on Truth Social — to a legal commentator on CNN.

The commentator is Elie Honig, who put his opinion in a New York Magazine piece, "Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot," which I blogged here, 4 days ago.

Watch the CNN interview:

🚨BREAKING:

A CNN legal analyst just DESTROYED Jack Smith and Judge Chutkan for what appears to be political motivation in releasing the 165-page brief.

A legal analyst, who has handled thousands of cases, stated that he has NEVER witnessed such an occurrence before. He also… pic.twitter.com/7a5ZHa3hmJ

— Gunther Eagleman™ (@GuntherEagleman) October 7, 2024

"[Jack] Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he’ll bend any rule, switch up on any practice — so long as he gets to chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects."

"At this point, there’s simply no defending Smith’s conduct on any sort of principled or institutional basis. 'But we need to know this stuff before we vote!' is a nice bumper sticker, but it’s neither a response to nor an excuse for Smith’s unprincipled, norm-breaking practice. (It also overlooks the fact that the Justice Department bears responsibility for taking over two and a half years to indict in the first place.)..."

Writes former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig, in "Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot" (in New York Magazine).

The way motions work... is that the prosecutor files an indictment; the defense makes motions (to dismiss charges, to suppress evidence, or what have you); and then the prosecution responds to those motions.... [Smith] asked Judge Chutkan for permission to file first.... Trump’s team objected, and the judge acknowledged that Smith’s request to file first was “procedurally irregular” — moments before she ruled in Smith’s favor, as she’s done at virtually every consequential turn.

Smith has complained throughout the case that Trump’s words might taint the jury pool.... Yet Smith now uses grand-jury testimony (which ordinarily remains secret at this stage) and drafts up a tidy 165-page document that contains all manner of damaging statements about a criminal defendant, made outside of a trial setting and without being subjected to the rules of evidence or cross-examination, and files it publicly, generating national headlines. You know who’ll see those allegations? The voters, sure — and also members of the jury pool....

The Justice Manual — DOJ’s internal bible, essentially — contains a section titled “Actions That May Have an Impact on the Election.” Now: Does Smith’s filing qualify? May it have an impact on the election? Of course. So what does the rule tell us? “Federal prosecutors … may never select the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”

Remember, Smith begged the judge to flip the rules on their head so he could file this document first, and quickly — “any action,” by any reasonable definition — with the election right around the corner.....

"Let me preempt the Hamlet routine... around whether Trump will take the stand in his own defense: He shouldn’t, and he won’t."

Writes former prosecutor Elie Honig, in "Will Donald Trump Take the Stand?" (NY Magazine).

We can already see Trump’s subtle but unmistakable retreat from bluster to sanity. At first, Trump boasted that he “would” testify in his own defense. Note the careful word choice: Would, which includes an element of conditionality, isn’t quite the same as will. Days later, he prudently stepped back: “Well, I would if it’s necessary. Right now, I don’t know if you heard about today. Today was just incredible. People are saying — the experts, I’m talking about legal scholars and experts — they’re saying, ‘What kind of a case is this? There is no case.’”...

[Trump has] two ironclad reasons not to testify. 

"Here’s the [Hur] report’s biggest revelation: Biden held on to classified top-secret national-security documents..."

"... after he left the vice-presidency, and he did it intentionally. This was no accident. Biden had those documents for this specific reason: He believed he had been right on American policy in Afghanistan (and that President Barack Obama had been wrong), and he wanted to paint himself as the visionary hero (and Obama as the heel) in the historical narrative. That’s why Biden shared some of their contents with his ghostwriter — though Hur acknowledges that Biden may have disclosed that classified information inadvertently, citing Biden’s 'lapses in attention and vigilance.' Here’s the single most important piece of evidence in Hur’s report: In a recording made by the ghostwriter in February 2017 — a month after Biden left the vice-presidency — Biden says he had 'just found all the classified stuff downstairs.'...  He kept those sensitive documents and said nothing for five more years. Not until 2022 — after the FBI executed its search warrant on Trump at Mar-a-Lago — did Biden’s people alert the authorities...."

Writes Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor, in "The Real Biden Documents Scandal (It’s Not the Old-Man Stuff)" (NY Magazine).

"There’s a tremendous amount of information she has on some very important people. Now that she’s been convicted she may be more eager to discuss."

"She certainly should, in my mind, because a lot of people skated here, while she bore the brunt of the government’s full wrath."

Said Jeffrey Lichtman, "the defense attorney who represented the Mexican drug trafficker Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán at trial two years ago," quoted in "Speculation grows that Maxwell may try to cut a deal for reduced sentence/Experts say any deal depends on whether US government believes it is worth investigating network that may have been involved" (The Guardian).