Revised Trump Indictment Could Take Years to Play Out_ Legal Expert

All right, joining us now is Mark Miller, senior attorney at Pacific Legal Foundation. Mark, how are you doing? Very good, great to be with you. All right, so how exactly has Smith's team gone about separating private and official acts? So Jack Smith here has given himself quite the road a hoe, or you could say the Supreme Court has given him quite the burden. He took the indictment that the Supreme Court had effectively eviscerated quite a bit of it by ruling that much of what was alleged was immune conduct. And he tried to rewrite the indictment, and he actually put it in front of a new grand jury, ostensibly so he could say that the new grand jury was not tainted by the evidence that shouldn't have been included because it involved immune conduct of then-President Trump. I think that Jack Smith's efforts here are trying his best to salvage what is a case that the Supreme Court decision effectively took the legs out from for the most part. And it will be interesting to see how far this gets before Election Day, and if former President Trump wins, then what happens. And if Vice President Kamala Harris wins, whether she would allow the case to go forward and how it would even go forward. It could take years if it were to go forward at all. And on that note, would you mind, if you will, elaborating for us on the specific actions that Smith's team still need to do to prosecute Trump on? So what Jack Smith and his team did here is they tried to focus their aim at the conduct that arguably doesn't fit, or at least a jury would have to decide doesn't fit what the Supreme Court said was immune conduct. That is official presidential conduct. For example, as J.D. Vance said in that video, if you're the president and you're engaged in defense of the country and instructing national defense to act there, that's core presidential conduct that you would be immune from being charged with a crime, as Vice President candidate Vance suggested. So instead, what Jack Smith has done is he's focusing on the five states that were in play that really the election was going to turn on, Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. And he's saying that when the Trump team allegedly tried to create a second set of electors, so not the official set of electors from those states that were going to say Biden won, but a second set, that that was a crime, really three different conspiracies is what Jack Smith says. He has got four counts. It's a little surprising that he's bringing all the same counts that the Supreme Court effectively took a lot of the wind out of the sails on those four counts, both in the Trump case and also in another case called Fisher. And yet, nevertheless, Jack Smith is soldiering on. I'm not surprised. I don't want to say there's anything unusual about him trying to come up with a new indictment. That's what happened in any criminal case if the higher court didn't say the case should be thrown out. But it is going to be tough for Jack Smith to carry this much more forward. So Trump's team is calling for an immediate dismissal. Do you think that's likely? I think that's unlikely. I think if it was probably up to Jack Smith, he would have asked perhaps for the case to be delayed until after the election day because it's going to become obviously a political hot potato for the next couple of months. But the judge in the case, Judge Huckin, basically made it clear this case needed to move forward one way or the other. So I think what you'll see is you'll see the Trump lawyers moving to dismiss this new indictment. I think it will take some time for that to get set for a hearing. We may not even see a hearing until much before Election Day. And of course, we have all those other cases pending as well with President Trump, including the New York criminal case. So we would have thought perhaps that these cases would have been put on the back burner until Election Day, but apparently not. So last month, a Florida judge threw out Jack Smith's classified documents case against Trump. She said Smith was illegally appointed. Could something like that happen in this case? Well, we know that that same issue came before the appeals court that would be supervising Judge Huckin, the district judge, the trial judge in this case. And that appeals court in a different case rejected the kind of argument that Judge Cannon accepted in the Florida case, which is the documents at Mar-a-Lago that the president took documents that he shouldn't have that were confidential, protected to Mar-a-Lago, didn't protect them. And so Judge Cannon threw it out, but the D.C. Circuit has already ruled on that kind of argument and said, no, an independent prosecutor like Jack Smith in these facts can move forward with the case. And so the appeals court in Atlanta, which covers Florida, will have to decide, do they agree with that D.C. Circuit decision that would control Judge Huckin up in D.C., so this case, or say that, no, Judge Cannon got it right. Either way, I think that's another argument that will go before the U.S. Supreme Court ultimately. And we know that Justice Thomas agrees with Justice Cannon. He had said as much in this Smith case, the Trump case. It's hard to keep them all together. Bottom line is, no, the D.C. Circuit case won't be thrown out on that same argument, but you will see ultimately that issue get to the U.S. Supreme Court, I would predict. So it seems to me that perhaps this case will go beyond the election. So, I mean, what are Trump's options? Either he wins or loses the election. Yeah, I think practically speaking, if President Trump wins, I think it's very unlikely this case goes much further because Jack Smith effectively would have his legs cut out from him by the president of the United States. I think the case would probably be ended if President Trump wins after he was sworn in as president, if former President Trump wins. If Vice President Harris wins, then it gets more interesting. Vice President, excuse me, President Ford pardoned Richard Nixon to try and put the Nixon situation behind the country and put it in the past in the rearview mirror and try to move forward. A lot of people didn't like that, but President Ford thought he was doing what was best for the country. That's the kind of bridge that Vice President Harris would have to traverse if she wins the election. She would have to decide, she just put an end to all this, the Trump travails, not the state cases, but at least the federal cases. You could see her wanting to do that, to take the high road, if you will. It will be interesting to see what happens. Nobody with half a brain would try to make any predictions right now because we still have another couple of months before Election Day. All right, Mark, thank you so much for your insight today. Always a pleasure to join you.