Jack Smith Is Feeling ‘Confident’ in New Trump Indictment: Legal Analyst

Special Counsel Jack Smith’s new superseding indictment in former President Donald Trump’s election fraud case signals his team is “confident,” MSNBC legal analyst and criminal attorney Danny Cevallos told Newsweek.
Filed on Tuesday after Smith sought a month-long delay in the case from Washington, D.C., District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, the new indictment is nine pages shorter than the original but maintains all four criminal counts against Trump, the 2024 Republican presidential nominee.
The new indictment has a much greater emphasis on Trump as a candidate, not as the president. It also deletes the allegation that Trump put pressure on Justice Department officials to help overturn the 2020 election result.
Cevallos said that “superseding indictments are common, and they are usually bad news for a defendant. Normally the government is adding evidence, witnesses, or criminal charges. This is a rare case because the government is actually removing allegations.” He added that, “some of the allegations, Smith had to remove, or a court was going to do it for him.”
Trump was indicted on four counts of allegedly working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the January 6, 2021, riot at the U.S. Capitol. Trump has pleaded not guilty and has repeatedly said the case is part of a political witch hunt.
On Tuesday, he posted on Truth Social that Smith’s filing was “an effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt in Washington D.C., in an act of and in order to save face.” In the same post, he called the move “an attempt to INTERFERE WITH THE ELECTION.” Trump and Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, are in a very tight race for the Oval Office.
In another post Tuesday, Trump wrote: “PERSECUTION OF A POLITICAL OPPONENT!”
In a 6-3 ruling on July 1, the U.S. Supreme Court found that presidents have broad immunity for official acts. The court said presidents have absolute immunity for core political acts and some immunity for other acts committed as president, but no immunity for strictly private conduct.
It also ruled that official acts cannot be used as evidence if taking a case against a president for unofficial acts.
Newsweek filed out a contact request form with the Department of Justice for comment on Wednesday and reached out via email to Trump’s campaign on behalf of his legal team for comment.
Cevallos said that “Jack Smith’s team chose not to remove the allegations about Trump’s contacts with Mike Pence,” in reference to allegations that Trump sought to “enlist” the then-vice president in an election scheme. Pence is described in the indictment as Trump’s running mate and vice president.
He said that the prosecution’s decision to not remove references to Pence “signals to me that the Special Counsel is confident enough to risk getting some allegations tossed by a court, rather than cutting them himself.” Cevallos said that the allegations could be “tossed” because “they are likely entitled to some form of presumptive immunity, according to the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.”
Earlier Wednesday, in an appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, Cevallos, called Smith’s new indictment, “strategic” and a “very brilliant move to keep this indictment alive.”
He highlighted that because the new filing still includes the four counts, “that means if the defendant is convicted, the sentencing guidelines will be exactly the same,” Cevallos explained. He concluded that while the indictment “has been reduced in length, everything that matters is still in it.”
Another MSNBC legal analyst on the show, Glenn Kirschner, a former assistant U.S. attorney and frequent Trump critic, said “Jack Smith decided to go proactive” with this new indictment.
Kirschner told Newsweek that he “love[s] what Jack Smith has done,” because he is “taking the bull by the horns” and proactively interpreting how the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling might impact the case and pulling out what “might run afoul of what the Supreme Court said.”
Kirschner noted that since the four charges remain, Smith has “concluded he has enough admissible evidence to support all four felony counts.”
Kirschner also said that because the new indictment was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in the case, Smith “didn’t put anything that he believed was privileged,” which he believes will make Trump’s defense more difficult.
In addition to Trump’s condemnation of the new indictment, Ohio Senator JD Vance, Trump’s running mate, called Smith’s move, a “classic” example of “lipstick on a pig,” on Tuesday in Nashville, Tennessee.
“Jack Smith tried to redefine Mike Pence from ‘the Vice President’ to ‘the running mate’ as if somehow changing those words in an indictment undercuts the fact that Mike Pence is still the sitting vice president and it still directly implicates the president’s official act,” Vance said.