A mostly sealed court battle between Team Trump and special counsel Jack Smith, who's currently prosecuting two criminal cases against the former president, has spurred a new court filing in which Smith says Trump's remarks online could taint the jury pool in his election interference indictment. As CNN reports, prosecutors on Tuesday tried to file court documents partially under seal and partially on the public docket. This drew complaints from Trump's attorneys, who say they should have a court-allowed 14 days to respond before any of the documents go public.
Smith's team's response, in its filing: "Such a requirement would grind litigation in this case to a halt, which is particularly infeasible given the pressing matters before the court—including the defendant's daily extrajudicial statements that threaten to prejudice the jury pool in this case, as described in the government's motion." Those type of statements are exactly what prosecutors had feared, and what US District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who's presiding over the election subversion case, warned Trump's team against last month. The AP notes that as recently as Tuesday, Trump continued to post "provocative" remarks on his Truth Social site about both Smith and Chutkan.
The former president called Smith a "deranged" prosecutor with "unchecked" aggression, while for Chutkan, Trump reposted a newspaper article about her, along with a sarcastic "Oh, I'm sure she will be very fair." Not that further sanctions from Chutkan would necessarily hurt Trump politically: Writing for CNN, Stephen Collinson notes that "the dichotomy between the level of legal and political accountability has rarely been more stark." Collinson cites a new poll showing that Trump holds the support of 52% of GOP and Republican-leaning independent voters—34 points ahead of his nearest GOP rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis.
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The majority of that same segment of voters say that even if the charges in any of the four criminal cases against Trump hold water, none of them are relevant to his fitness to be president. Plus, 61% believe the charges against him are due to partisan abuse of the judicial system (as opposed to 14% who say Trump has mostly brought his woes upon himself). Chutkan has ordered both Trump's legal team and Smith's—the former by Monday, the latter by next Wednesday—to file more legal briefs "on whether and how the underlying Smith submission should be posted on the docket," per CNN. (More election interference indictment stories.)
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