The judge overseeing Donald Trump’s federal election obstruction case accused the former president of “injecting politics” into the criminal proceedings, according to a legal expert’s analysis.
Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor and frequent Trump critic, made the claims while discussing U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan’s recent decision to release a trove of documents from Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team regarding Trump’s alleged criminal attempt to overturn the 2020 election results.
Trump’s lawyers objected to the unsealing of the filing so close to November’s presidential election. The former president has pleaded not guilty to four federal charges under Smith’s investigation and frequently accuses the case of being a politically motivated “witch hunt” that aims to hinder his chances of winning the 2024 race.
Denying Trump’s legal team’s last-minute request to keep the filings sealed, Chutkan wrote: “If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute—or appear to be— election interference.
“The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision making, rather than incorporating them as defendant requests.”
Speaking on his “Justice Matters” YouTube channel, Kirschner said Chutkan was telling the former president “very pointedly no you, Donald Trump, are the one injecting politics into this criminal case.”
Kirschner said: “‘You’re asking me expressly to make decisions about how I should go about litigating this case based on the election, because you’re saying, ‘Judge, don’t release the evidence, the appendix, the attachments prior to the election.”
“That is urging the court to do something for political reasons. She said, ‘I will not do that.'”
Newsweek has contacted Trump’s legal team for comment via email.
Many of the around 1,900 pages of documents that were released Friday were heavily redacted. These pages are believed to be transcripts of grand jury testimony and FBI witness interview write-ups.
The viewable information is largely already public. This includes a transcript of a January 2021 phone call where Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” 11,780 votes needed to beat Joe Biden in the state at the last election.
The filings also include screenshots of Trump’s social media posts about the 2020 election, and former Vice President Mike Pence’s letter to Congress explaining why he could not refuse to certify the 2020 election results on January 6, 2021, during his purely ceremonial role as presiding officer of the Senate.
Kirschner said that the pages in the newly released documents may be redacted as they are connected to the unnamed co-conspirators who feature in the federal indictment against Trump, who have not been charged.
“Think back to Watergate, right? Watergate took years to work its way through the criminal justice system,” Kirschner said.
“There were 69 indictments and 48 convictions, and when you look at the crimes committed by Richard Nixon and his co-conspirators, those crimes look like shoplifting offenses as compared to what Donald Trump and his criminal associates did on and around January 6.
“So I know it feels like justice is taking forever to get here, But Jack Smith, I believe, is just getting warmed up.”
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