How Trump’s Jan. 6 charges were 'very skillfully done to avoid pitfalls': legal analyst

09 November 2023

During Thursday's episode of MSNBC's The Beat with Ari Melber, legal analyst and former FBI general counsel Andrew Weissman shared insight on U.S. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's new filing suggesting that ex-President "Donald Trump directly stoked the violence that erupted" at the United States Capitol on January 6.

"When you look at the trial, people don't know what they don't know. But they have an idea of what they think January 6th was," Melber said. "If they think it's a riot, if they think it just got out of control, that premise would cut against the government's theory of the case. Did you glean anything from the filings that they would try to show what I quoted there — Smith saying this is a culmination of premeditated conspiracies?"

Weissman replied, "I think if the government had charged that it was premeditated violence on the part of the former president, then they would have that issue. If someone said, 'it got out of control,' then there would be this question of, 'Well, can the government show that this was a plan all along?' Which, by the way, is what they were able to show with respect to the Proud Boys, the Oath Keepers, different defendants, and they were charged with sedition because of that and managed to win on almost all of those cases."

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He continued, "With the former president there, they're not going to have to deal with that because they didn't charge the violence as part of the crime. They just need to be able to show that part of his plan was to have this rally there. Whether it gets out of control or not is something that isn't really part of the charge. It was just that, was there going to be additional pressure? Then when it turned violent, what did the former president do according to the government? He used that to continue the conspiracy, to continue the pressure campaign to not count the electoral votes. So I think that they have very carefully charged this to deal with those kinds of defenses at trial so that's why when the case was charged, I think a lot of us were looking and going, 'This was very skillfully done to avoid pitfalls.'"

Watch the video below or at this link.

How Trump’s Jan. 6 charges were 'very skillfully done to avoid pitfalls': legal analystyoutu.be

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