Former President Donald Trump’s lawyer and spokeswoman warned special counsel Jack Smith he should be concerned about his cases against her client after a U.S. Supreme Court ruling last week.
Alina Habba told Newsmax that Smith should be “scared” after the nation’s highest court rejected his request for a quick decision on whether Trump is covered under presidential immunity for alleged actions that occurred on or around Jan. 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol riot.
Smith, who requested in court filings that Trump be prohibited from making “political attacks” during his impending trial, “should be scared,” she said to Sebastian Gorka, a former official in the Trump administration standing in for regular host Greg Kelly.
Habba declared, “There has been a violation of due process,” and added that Smith is “running scared.”
According to Habba, “They do it in the form of a gag order.” “In essence, he wants the defence to raise no defence at all. That was the outcome of my most recent attempt at a trial. That’s what will occur when I attempt one more.
She said that judges would try to “gag you” and that her client would use “his voice and popularity as a way to work against us and the American people so that people cannot hear the truth.”
Smith contended that Trump “should be barred during his federal trial on election subversion charges from telling jurors that he is being selectively prosecuted,” according to court documents filed on Wednesday, Newsmax said.
“Through public statements, filings, and argument in hearings before the court, the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in the papers. “Although the court can recognize these efforts for what they are and disregard them, the jury — if subjected to them — may not.”
Trump’s so-called “election interference” trial is scheduled to begin March 4. An Obama appointee is handling the case, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who has already ruled against several motions filed by the former president. She has also imposed a gag order on him.
“That’s saying you cannot put your own defense,” Habba said. “That’s like saying you can’t have an expert on the [New York Attorney General] Letitia James case or gagging his lawyers, which has happened to me. I was gagged in the courtroom. I could not put on a defense on the record for the appellate division. I couldn’t say things that needed to be said. That is what our country has come to.”
She went on to believe that Smith was trying to intimidate the Supreme Court into making a decision on presidential immunity too soon.