Archived version

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.

[…]

“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.

[…]

“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.”