Ex-Trump lawyer: Jack Smith may have double-talked himself into a corner on Mike Pence
Special counsel Jack Smith's decision to include evidence of former President Donald Trump's pressuring his vice president in Smith's paired-down indictment in the federal election conspiracy case may come back to haunt him, a former attorney for Trump said Wednesday.
At issue, argued former Trump attorney Tim Parlatore to CNN's Wolf Blitzer, is that to comply with the Supreme Court's ruling on presidential immunity, Smith reversed himself on what capacity Mike Pence was acting in from his earlier court filings.
"The Supreme Court ruled he has immunity for official acts, but not necessarily for private acts," said Blitzer. "This document makes the case that these were all private acts on his part. I want to read another part of the filing about what Trump told then-Vice President Mike Pence as he was trying to get him to overturn the results of the election ... 'The defendant told him that 'hundreds of thousands of people are going to hate your guts' and 'people are going to think you're stupid'' ... and berated him pointedly, adding 'You're too honest.' What does this say about the pressure, the pressure campaign against Pence and Trump's state of mind?"
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"Well, this is obviously — it's a document written by prosecutors, so we'll see how much of this actually comes out at trial. And I think that's kind of a problem," said Parlatore.
"You have to remember one thing," said Parlatore. "I find it very interesting that this document tries to cast Mike Pence as the running mate and also the president of the Senate, in an effort to try to move all of Trump's conduct away from being president and into candidate. And yet it wasn't that long ago that Jack Smith was in the D.C. courthouse, saying, in an effort to force Mike Pence to testify, that no, he was not acting in his capacity as president of the Senate, because that would have provided him the privilege to not testify."
"So back then he said he wasn't the president of the Senate to get exactly the quote that you just read to me there, and now he's turned around and gone the other way," Parlatore concluded. "So I think he's going to have some legal issues with that."
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