Special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday filed a motion that urged U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to put guardrails in place to protect the possible jurors in Donald Trump’s election-subversion case.
Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner suggested Smith hadn’t just “taken off the gloves” with the move. It “looks like he’s boxed them up, taped up the box, and sent them to long-term storage,” Kirschner said on a new episode of his “Justice Matters” podcast.
Smith encouraged Chutkan to streamline the jury selection process with a questionnaire for potential jurors, ban their details from being public, and prohibit direct contact between attorneys and jurors.
The motion referred to Republican 2024 front-runner Trump’s attack on social media of a court official in his civil fraud trial in New York, which prompted a judge to slap the former president with a gag order.
Some interesting wrinkles:
Everything that he outlines per this article is literally just enforcement of the rules. The jury is not to be prejudiced or intimidated, which should be obvious, and therefore these limits are already in place.
The only thing he asks for is to enforce these more strictly, and considering all the comments Trump already made, that’s not far fetched. No one here is thinking he is “taking off the gloves”, this is just a very self-service view.
Also interesting: Jack Smith used to be impartial when he investigated the events surrounding this case. Considering he’s moving forward with the case and a lot of confidence in public, I can only imagine the types of evidence he has seen and marked for discovery.