Jack Smith moves to crack down on Donald Trump
We’re now just one appeals court ruling and one Supreme Court shrug from the start of Donald Trump’s Washington DC criminal trial. While we wait for that to play out, Jack Smith isn’t waiting around. He’s already making preparations for the trial, and that includes preemptively cracking down on Trump’s inevitable antics.
Jack Smith has made a filing with Judge Chutkan, seeking to bar Donald Trump from making certain false claims during the trial. Smith is looking to block Trump from claiming he’s being prosecuted by President Biden, and claiming that January 6th was incited by undercover agents.
Jury screening processes will ensure that Trump’s trial jurors are nonpolitical people who don’t closely follow political news, and (by design) they will therefore come into the trial with no more than a pedestrian knowledge of Trump’s actions in relation to the 2020 election. So it’ll be important to make sure that Trump can’t try to hijack the trial by spinning unhinged conspiracy theories.
But the biggest news here is that Jack Smith is proceeding with trial preparation with the expectation that the trial is indeed going to happen on time. For all the hyperbolic doom and gloom in the media about how this trial is somehow going to be pushed past the election, Jack Smith obviously doesn’t see it that way.
