Jack Smith Exposed ‘Danger’ of Supreme Court’s Trump Ruling—Legal Analyst

Department of Justice Special Counsel Jack Smith’s new indictment against former President Donald Trump exposed the “danger” of the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling, legal scholar Laurence Tribe said.
Smith on Tuesday filed a new indictment against Trump in the case into his alleged attempts to thwart the 2020 election results, which the former president has claimed was stolen via widespread fraud despite a lack of substantial evidence. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges and has accused Smith of targeting him for political purposes.
The revised indictment comes after the Supreme Court ruled in July that presidents have immunity from prosecution for official acts, but not for acts as a private citizen or candidate. Trump has argued his actions were official acts so he should not be prosecuted.
However, prosecutors allege he was acting as a private citizen for many of his alleged attempts at overturning the election results. In the latest indictment, Smith emphasized that Trump was acting as a candidate—not as president—when trying to overturn the results. The indictment still includes the same four criminal counts on which Trump was initially charged.
Tribe, professor emeritus of constitutional law at Harvard University, took to X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter) to respond to Smith’s new indictment against Trump.
He shared an opinion article from The Washington Post, written by associate editor Ruth Marcus, who highlighted that many of the changes in the indictment follow the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling.
Tribe agreed, writing that Smith “perfectly jumped through the stupid hoops SCOTUS insisted he jump through to ensnare Citizen Trump.”
“But the exercise itself ironically exposed the idiocy and danger of the Court’s immunity ruling, one that insisted on treating Hamlet as though he wasn’t the Prince when he performed his starring role,” Tribe wrote.
Newsweek reached out to the Department of Justice via the agency’s media contact form and the Supreme Court’s public information office via email for comment.
The new indictment comes just days after Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson expressed concern about the immunity decision during an interview with CBS News.
“I was concerned about a system that appeared to provide immunity for one individual under one set of circumstances when we have a criminal justice system that had ordinarily treated everyone the same,” she said.
Among the changes made by Smith, the latest indictment, which is nine parges shorter, no longer mentions Jeffrey Clark, a former DOJ official identifiable as alleged “co-conspirator No. 4” in the initial indictment.
On Tuesday, Trump posted on Truth Social that Smith’s filing was “an effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt in Washington D.C., in an act of and in order to save face.” In the same post, he called the move “an attempt to INTERFERE WITH THE ELECTION.” Trump is locked in a close race against Vice President Kamala Harris ahead of November.