Former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy expressed that U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan erred significantly in her decision to permit the release of additional documents from special prosecutor Jack Smith.
Last week, she consented to make over 1,800 pages of evidence against former President Donald Trump accessible to the public in the federal election interference case being pursued by Smith, which may ultimately not proceed to trial. McCarthy cautioned that this action could jeopardize the integrity of the potential jury pool for the case.
“I’m not curious because I thought from the beginning this was a political exercise. Now, that doesn’t mean there’s not a case in there someplace, but the timing of this strategically has always been a political exercise,” he said on the Fox News show “The Story.”
“I have to chuckle when Judge Chutkan says she would not want to let politics or anything like that enter into her decision-making. A judge in a normal case, Trace, would be concerned about the jury pool,” the former prosecutor said.
“Contrary to what Judge Chutkan says, her responsibility is not to the American people writ large to fill the campaign airwaves with new information. Her responsibility is to give Trump a fair trial and make sure the jury pool’s not prejudiced,” he said.
“And any judge who was making that her north star would be very concerned about releasing this information prior to the election. Jack Smith, if he was a normal prosecutor, if he was serious when he was running around saying that his defendant is a threat to democracy as we know it and could even be a threat to witnesses, the last thing you would do is release all your case if that was what you’re really concerned about,” he said.
In August, Alan Dershowitz, a legal scholar and emeritus professor of law at Harvard, expressed his belief that the indictment brought by Smith will not result in a conviction of the former president. He noted that Smith faces a significant challenge with this new indictment in Washington, D.C., as it will be difficult to establish that Trump genuinely believed he had lost to Joe Biden in the 2020 election.
“The indictment charges that Donald Trump knew, knew, and believed that he had actually lost the election. How’s the government gonna prove that?” he said. “He never said that to anybody. He never wrote that anywhere. Did he ever think it? I don’t know. Did he say it on a phone call that was illegally overheard? I doubt it.”
“I have spoken to President Trump about this. I think he’s wrong. I think he lost the election, fair and square. Now I’m not talking about the influence of Russia and all kinds of things external, but in terms of the counting of votes, that’s just what I’m talking about now. I think he lost Georgia, I think he lost Arizona and I think he lost enough states so that Joe Biden was officially and correctly elected president of the United States,” the legal scholar said.
“It’s not a crime to disbelieve that, in fact, the indictment says that it’s not a crime to speak about that and to oppose it, but if he believed it, if he honestly believed it, if he talked himself into it, even if he was wrong, if he believed it if he thought he had won the election, then everything he’s accused of doing is protected by the First Amendment, Article Two of the Constitution and the Twelfth Amendment,” he said.
