Trump trial: Be sure not to miss this interview

One thing specifically...I was concerned that a judge might want to fold all people who are indicted into the one trial with Trump.  I know those co-conspirators aren't indicted, but the question remains of WHEN they will be, because we know they will be.  If for some reason they have to be indicted before Trump's trial gets underway, that could allow for a decision by the judge to combine.  Perhaps Judge Chutkan  wouldn't do that, but as Ryan Goodman points out, the co-conspirators are looking at charges Smith laid out that do not involve Trump.  To me that's another clever move on Smith's part that shows he's nobody's fool. A wily prosecutor.  If the judge wanted to combine defendants, he can argue that the others have charges that need to be kept separate.  I love Jack more and more all the time.

Also...

Excerpts:

“I can’t conceive of another prosecutor who has come close to the enormity of the challenges that Smith faces in a country that can’t even agree on certain facts and that came so close to the precipice of a violent interruption in the transfer of power as a democracy,” says Ryan Goodman, a professor at New York University’s law school. “This is his burden. And it’s unparalleled.”

[...]

Fan accounts have emerged on social media, while sites sell memorabilia ranging from posters, mugs and T-shirts to stickers with tick boxes labelled “single”, “taken” and “mentally dating Jack Smith”.

[...]

This is not Smith’s first high-profile case. He previously served as chief prosecutor in a special court at The Hague hearing Kosovo war crimes cases. There he indicted former Kosovo president Hashim Thaçi, who has since pleaded not guilty. Legal experts argue such experience has primed him to handle polarising and much-scrutinised investigations.

Smith “appears to be the right person for the moment”, says Goodman. “It shows the kind of intrepid prosecutor who is basically going to apply the law to the facts and not worry about political considerations.”

[...]

He is a “hard-nosed guy”, says Vinegrad. “I would not want to be on the other side of Jack Smith in a criminal case.”

[...]

As head of the Department of Justice’s public integrity section in the 2010s, Smith has also overseen prosecutions of US lawmakers — with mixed results. The unit’s targets included Democratic vice-presidential nominee John Edwards, who was acquitted, and Bob McDonnell, the former Republican governor of Virginia whose conviction was overturned by the Supreme Court.

The charges against him “were completely wrong”, McDonnell told Fox News last week. Smith is “just overzealous”, he added. “I think he doesn’t do an honest look at the law to see if the facts apply to the law and so he’d rather win than get it right.”

  Financial Times

I'm a fan. I think he can do both.

And one last thing:  This is the issue I find a little confusing, but I trust those who are saying this argument doesn't work.

What about the Kelly case, in which the Supreme Court threw out the conviction of New Jersey officials for closing a bridge exit for improper motives, or the McDonnell case, in which the Supreme Court threw out a Virginia governor’s “honest services” conviction? Don’t those help Trump?

Not in the way he might like. Both cases were unanimous at the high court. The Kelly case confirmed that the federal wire fraud law does not reach misconduct by state officials that does not involve money or property, and stands as part of a series of cases declining to interpret a variety of federal fraud statutes to reach deprivation of “honest services” at the state government level. But 18 U.S.C. 371, which bans conspiracy to defraud the federal government, is worded quite differently from the federal laws overseeing private and state‐​level misconduct, and has accordingly been interpreted by courts quite differently. To begin with, its terms are sweeping, banning conspiracy “to defraud the United States, or any agency thereof in any manner or for any purpose.” And unlike garden‐​variety federal fraud statutes, it lacks language referring to property gain or enrichment. Courts have accordingly long interpreted it to reach much conspiracy that is aimed at securing improper government action by deceit whether or not it is meant to accomplish a transfer of money or property. The most that can be said is that some legal thinkers would like the Supreme Court to read an implicit property requirement into the 371 statute as well. Doing so would require the Court to overturn a long list of old precedents.

In the McDonnell case the Court took a narrow view of what “official act” means for state‐level bribery purposes. It is not clear that this issue will be important in the Trump prosecution.

  CATO Institute