'Jaw-dropping': Law professor 'Wowed' 25 times reading Smith's latest filing
Special counsel Jack Smith has built an airtight case against former President Donald Trump in his superseding indictment and in the new, massive filing released Wednesday, a retired Harvard Law professor argued.
Laurence Tribe told CNN's Erin Burnett on Wednesday that the case surmounts every obstacle the Supreme Court put in its way with the recent ruling that grants presidents a presumption of immunity for official acts.
"What stands out most clearly is that the Supreme Court, despite its effort to protect the former president and to erect a hurdle that was almost sky-high, made clear that it is possible to overcome that hurdle by specific proof that the former president, in his capacity as office-seeker, private capacity ... sought to overturn an election that he knew he had lost," said Tribe.
In his filing, Smith showed he "has the goods" — and the "receipts," said Tribe.
"The evidence is overwhelming and to the extent that there is any overlap between public and private, it occurs in the very limited context of communications between the president and the vice president," said Tribe. Even in that narrow slice of evidence, most of the communications were with Pence in his capacity as president of the Senate, making presidential immunity irrelevant, he argued.
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Ultimately, he said, "I cannot imagine a clearer case that meets the Court's standard."
And, he added, assuming Trump does not win re-election — in which case he can simply direct the Justice Department to dismiss the charges anyway — the case should be able to clear all the rest of the challenges and appeals and make it to trial.
"Professor just one quick thing to you," said Burnett. "Was there anything that just sort of made your jaw drop when you read this? I mean, you know so much of this, but this actually, you know, it put quotes on things, it put actual interactions, it put names on it in ways that we had not seen before. Did that sort of, even after everything you've seen and known, was there anything that you sort of said, 'Wow,' when you looked at it?"
"I said, 'Wow' about 25 times in a quick reading of this document. I bet there are another 25 that I will encounter," said Tribe "There are lots of jaw-dropping things. You've named some of them. You know, 'So what' if the vice president is hung, it doesn't matter whether we won or lost. That's just a sampling. It's the tip of a horribly large and scary iceberg."
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