CNN’s Paula Reid Predicts Trump Will Campaign On New Bombshell Filing ‘As a Martyr’ Of The Justice System

CNN chief legal affairs correspondent Paula Reid broke down what is likely next for Donald Trump’s January 6th case after Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest filing in the case, revealing new details to the public.

“So what is ahead here?” anchor Brianna Keilar asked Reid.

“So I think what you’re going to see is this is going to go from the court of law to the court of public opinion. And I would expect that the former president, as his attorneys have, he will try to argue that releasing this as some form of election interference,” Reid replied, adding:

Again, this case is not expected to go to trial any time soon. If former President Trump is reelected, this case is expected to be dismissed by his attorney general. So the idea of releasing a long narrative like this from prosecutors is highly unusual.

And his lawyers have argued, as they really have in all of his criminal cases, that any effort to release additional evidence is an effort to interfere with the election. Now, look, there’s no precedents for this. I mean, this is just this is just such an extraordinary circumstance. But I think that’s what you’re going to see next. The former president is going to argue that allowing even a redacted version of this filing to be released to the public is going to potentially hurt him in the election and that this is part of this larger conspiracy that he alleges by judges, by prosecutors to hurt his chances in November.

So I would expect that after initially we look and find the new details, I think that this is absolutely going to be used again in the court of public opinion to once again try to frame the former president as a martyr or a victim of the justice system.

“CNN’s Evan Perez is also with us. Evan, obviously this is notable given the longstanding DOJ policy around prosecutions on figures that are on candidates close to election time. But this isn’t exactly a new prosecution, right?” asked anchor Boris Sanchez.

“Right. Right, exactly. And by the way, we’re coming up just a few more days before essentially the Justice Department is supposed to go quiet. They have a 30-day unwritten rule, a 30-day quiet period that begins effectively on Saturday. Right. Because you are about a month away from the presidential election,” Perez replied, adding:

And so the Justice Department really would not be able to release any of this in the next 30 days. However, this is something that a judge, Judge Chutkan, has decided is appropriate for the public to see. And there’s a still there’s still obviously, there’s a lot of information. You can look at some of the pages in here that are redacted.

There’s details in here that are going to be that will not be public. But one of the things that is notable in here already, just from reading just the first few pages of this, this document is you can see the emphasis that the prosecutors have placed on the idea that what Donald Trump is accused of here in this case has to do with private conduct, that it is not what he did as a as the then sitting president of the United States, that what he was doing was as a in his private capacity, in his personal capacity, trying to essentially steal the election that he had lost.

And so that’s one of the things that you see already in some of the language that is written in this in this filing that the court has now released, again, just a few days before the Justice Department’s 30-day quiet period goes into effect guys.

“And, Paula?” Keilar said, throwing it back to Reid.

“So right now, we’re reading through this. And as you can see, we’re reading around redactions. Certain names are blacked out. So we’ll have to put those pieces together. But here you see prosecutors painting a picture of someone who’s trying to subvert the results of the election even before it happens. On page five of this, they talk about how the then president was talking to his campaign advisers about how the election may not be final, their results may not be final on Election Day. Concerns about mail-in ballots that they believed would benefit Biden and that they decided, quote, ‘That in such a scenario, Trump would simply have to declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected,’” Reid said reading from the filing, adding:

So this is just one of the details in this, something that we have heard before, certainly. But these are the kinds of details. This is how the special counsel is telling its story, explaining today its narrative of the case against former President Trump after the Supreme Court ruled that he does have some immunity.

Now, I want to note again, that if Trump is reelected, this case is going to be dismissed by his attorney general. But if he is not, this case is expected to very likely go back before the Supreme Court, because the reason this was filed is because Judge Tanya Chutkan has been tasked by the justices with assessing the charges in this case and the evidence in this case against their decision in July, granting him some immunity and deciding what remains. And I’m sure no matter what she says, one side is not going to be happy and they’re going to appeal.

And both lawyers on both sides of this case have told me they do expect this to go back to the Supreme Court. There was sort of an implicit invitation that the justices extended. They said, look, here’s our decision on immunity. Let’s go back and reassess the January 6th case and then maybe come back up if there are any additional questions. So if this case goes to trial, it’s still going to be a long road. And this is definitely the last opportunity that voters have to see what prosecutors gathered in this multi-year investigation because, of course, again, this case is not going to trial any time soon.

Watch above via CNN.