Jack Smith had Trump 'dead to rights': Yale professor

Based on recently released testimony transcripts, Yale law professor Asha Rangappa argued that former special counsel Jack Smith "wasn't going to lose" his cases against Donald Trump and had the president "dead to rights" for his misconduct.

Last month, Smith sat for a seven-hour hearing with the House Judiciary Committee about the investigations into Trump's efforts to provoke the January 6 Capitol riot and his "willful retention" of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. When transcripts were later released, legal experts and observers concurred that Smith had overwhelming confidence that he had the evidence to convict Trump at trial, but was held back from doing so by the Supreme Court's presidential immunity ruling and his reelection in 2024.

Appearing on The Bulwark's "Illegal News" podcast on Wednesday, Rangappa, a lawyer and senior lecturer at Yale University's Jackson School of Global Affairs, and host Sarah Longwell reached similar conclusions about Smith's testimony.

“So my main takeaway from the testimony was that Smith said he had proof, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Trump had engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power," Longwell said. "And that Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January of 2021 and repeatedly tried to obstruct justice to conceal his continued retention of those documents, which more or less we already knew...”

“To me, it's also just how definitive he was," Rangappa added. "He wasn't going to lose these cases if it went to trial. I think what it gets to, though, is that he had in his possession, in evidence, that at least for January 6th, that Trump knew what he was doing was wrong. In other words, I don't know if you remember at the time, there's been so much that's happened, but there was like, oh, could it be a defense if he says, I really believe that I won the election?”

She continued: “It sounds to me and I think this gets to the toll records question that we'll probably talk about in a second, that Jack Smith had sealed that particular question of no, this guy knew he had lost and then he was actively taking efforts to invalidate the vote of the country to prevent the certification, to prevent this transfer of power. I think on the Mar-a-Lago case, when he says that he had proof that Trump willfully retained these, I mean, he's using the legal language, right? The willful retention. But I suspect, and this is why I'm so sad that we'll never get to know this, that he had evidence of the motive... I feel like that is something that Jack Smith had uncovered. And there was a certainty to how he talked about it.”

Rangappa was uncertain, however, whether Smith would ever be able to share the evidence that his teams collected on Trump. Even if pressed about the subject in next week's public hearing, she suggested that he might be barred from disseminating such information by Department of Justice policy.