Ex-FBI general counsel: Jack Smith’s bombshell Trump filing 'much worse' than Watergate

03 October 2024

Wednesday, October 2 brought a major development in Jack Smith's election interference case against former President Donald Trump when Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed a 165-page legal brief from the special counsel. Smith, in the filing, makes a comprehensive argument for proceeding with the indictment and is mindful of the U.S. Supreme Court's controversial 6-3 immunity ruling in Trump v. the United States.

The High Court, in that decision, ruled that a U.S. president enjoys immunity from criminal prosecution for "official" acts committed as part of "core" duties but not for "unofficial" acts. And Smith's filing focuses on acts he considers "unofficial" and therefore, subject to criminal prosecution.

MSNBC's Mika Brzezinski, during an October 3 segment on "Morning Joe," brought on two former federal prosecutors to discuss Smith's filing: Barbara McQuade and Andrew Weissmann, who served as general counsel for the FBI during Barack Obama's presidency.

Weissmann, now 67, argued that Smith's 165-page filing is even more damning than the allegations against President Richard Nixon during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s.

When Brzezinski asked Weissmann what "stood out" in the document, the former FBI general counsel replied, "I am old enough to remember Watergate, which was a scandal about cheating and trying to find out what it is your opponent knew through illegal means and covering that up. This is so much worse. It lays out an effort to undermine and thwart the votes of millions and millions of people just to stay in office. And the evidence is coming from Donald Trump's own people: his own lawyers, his own campaign staff, and, most notably, his own vice president, who had every incentive to want to win that election but decided to act out of principle and follow the rule of law."

Weissmann continued, "So, this is a read that is so graphic, so devastating, and so dispiriting — that this is where the country is, when these allegations are the kind of thing that the normal laws of gravity would have people understanding that this person should never be in office again based on this really detailed exegesis of the facts around what Donald Trump did."

When MSNBC's Willie Geist asked McQuade what, in Smith's filing, "stood out" to her, the law professor and former federal prosecutor replied, "I think what stands out is the strength of the corroborating evidence."

McQuade explained, "We know this story essentially from what we heard before the January 6th Congressional Committee. But prosecutors have tools different from what Congress has — additional tools, grand jury subpoenas, search warrants. And from those things, they can get verbatim testimony of people who may have declined to go before the Congressional Committee. And with the search warrants, they can get the contents of text messages and e-mail messages, and even voicemail messages."

McQuade added that Smith's filing shows that "there were people on the inside telling Donald Trump, 'This is BS.'"

Watch the full video below or at this link.

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