How Jack Smith 'so effectively' uses Trump’s 'pathetic' court filings against him: legal analyst

In response to former President Donald Trump's motion to dismiss U.S. Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's Washington, D.C. January 6 case against him on Monday, Smith argued in a 79-page filing, "The defendant stands alone in history for his alleged crimes. No other president has engaged in conspiracy and obstruction to overturn valid election results and illegitimately retain power."

During Tuesday's episode of MSNBC's Deadline: White House, legal analyst and law professor Neal Katyal explained to host Nicolle Wallace why Smith and his team are "absolutely right on the law" in this case.

"When I have a big huge legal case, there's three audiences," Katyal said. "One is the court, as an audience, the second is the American public, and third is the audience of history. And what I think Smith has done so effectively in these filings, is he has taken these Trump filings, which are pathetic on their face and not calculated through the first audience -- the court at all, this is not going to win in any court of law — but it is relate to the second, and what Jack Smith is doing is, he's saying, 'Well I'm going to educate the public on the reverse. So that's why you have that beautiful language about all of the different lies that you just put up on the screen, Nicolle."

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He emphasized, "The goal here is to use Trump's filings, in a way against him, by basically demonstrating how ridiculous and absurd they are, and how simple and straightforward the case is for Smith. So when you get to something like Mens rea and criminal intent, this is a complicated legal concept, but the basic idea is that the criminal law requires you to have a bad intent. It's not enough to just do something bad. The question is, what is about intent that you have to show? And here, the prosecutors, as you said in the opening segment, use the word deceit. Indeed they used the word deceit 46 times in a filings yesterday."

Katyal continued, "And what they are saying is that, 'We do not needed to prove that Trump genuinely did not believe the Big Lie. We don't need a mind reader for Trump. all we need to do is show that he knowingly spread lies to try and stay in power.' That's it. And so, the things like the baseless allegations that dead people are casting ballots, or that voting machines were changed from Trump to [President Joe] Biden, things like that, all of that suffices to show that Trump committed a crime. That's what's going on here. They're absolutely right on the law. And I don't expect that this filing is calculate to do anything about Trump except try to speak to his base."

Watch the video below or at this link.

How Jack Smith is 'so effectively' using Trump's 'pathetic' filings against him: analystyoutu.be

READ MORE: Jack Smith slams Trump’s motion to dismiss: 'The defendant stands alone in American history'