In a new discussion on MSNBC, attorney Danny Cevallos — a legal analyst for the network — said that Special Counsel Jack Smith has the opportunity to use new materials from Michigan in potentially “devastating” fashion against Trump.
It’s newly reported audio of an evident phone conversation after the 2020 presidential election between then-President Donald Trump, the national chairwoman of Republicans’ main party organization the Republican National Committee, and two individuals involved in the process of certifying Michigan’s election results — a process that Trump and his allies targeted at multiple levels, there and elsewhere. Trump’s side pushed those Michigan figures for action ultimately supporting the then-president’s cause of trying to stay in office, with party chairwoman Ronna McDaniel offering legal assistance, a prospect with which Trump agreed.
Some suggested that offering legal assistance in evident exchange for sought action on the election results could amount to bribery.
As Cevallos explained on air: “So, if I’m Jack Smith, maybe you look at that Michigan evidence, or any evidence from any other state, and bring that in as evidence in your D.C. court case and say, ‘Look, this is what he was doing elsewhere. This was not a mistake. This is his modus operandi.’ This all should come in. And it can be devastating evidence. I can tell you personally that bad act evidence, that somebody did something else bad somewhere else, is devastating, and juries — they eat it up.”
Trump’s case in which this would be relevant, involving charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith at the federal Justice Department over Trump’s schemes to stay in power after 2020, is mostly now before a D.C. court of appeals to handle his claims the case should be stopped because of supposedly wide-ranging legal protections that he holds by virtue of his presidency. The Supreme Court declined to make an early intervention and decide the arguments before that appeals court, which would have potentially sped up the process. Watch the MSNBC clip below, earlier highlighted by Raw Story:
