Special counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday filed a motion that urged U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to put guardrails in place to protect the possible jurors in Donald Trump’s election-subversion case.
Former U.S. Army prosecutor Glenn Kirschner suggested Smith hadn’t just “taken off the gloves” with the move. It “looks like he’s boxed them up, taped up the box, and sent them to long-term storage,” Kirschner said on a new episode of his “Justice Matters” podcast.
Smith encouraged Chutkan to streamline the jury selection process with a questionnaire for potential jurors, to ban their details from being made public and to prohibit direct contact between attorneys and the jurors.
The motion referred to Republican 2024 front-runner Trump’s attack on social media of a court official in his civil fraud trial in New York, which prompted a judge to slap the former president with a gag order.
Trump’s lawyers have opposed the motion, said Kirschner.
“If Donald Trump has shown anything to be true: it is he is willing to endanger witnesses, jurors, prosecutors, judges, their respective family members,” he added. “And he’s willing to urge his supporters to do all sorts of, let’s call them inappropriate things, to help him avoid and evade his responsibility for his crimes.”