Former Assistant U.S. Attorney Andy McCarthy torched Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest indictment of former President Donald Trump in a Tuesday night appearance on Fox News.
A federal grand jury handed up a third indictment against Trump consisting of four charges relating to his alleged attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election. McCarthy said that, to make his case, Smith had to “distort statutes” and that the matter should have been handled via the impeachment process.
“This was as weak as it was foretold to be,” McCarthy told host Bret Baier. “You see a lot of deceitful conduct, but the problem I think Jack Smith has is that Congress has not enacted statutes that directly criminalize the behavior that Smith is talking about. But what he has to do is distort statutes in order to try and pigeonhole the behavior into them…The statutes on the books now are vague, and otherwise Congress hasn’t criminalized that.”
He also argued that it will be difficult to prove whether Trump knowingly lied about the 2020 election being fraudulent.
“[Smith] has extravagantly stretched these statues in order to try and capture this behavior and that’s because this is a proxy for what should have been a political impeachment process they’re leaving to the criminal justice system, the failure of Congress to carry out a successful impeachment,” McCarthy continued.
McCarthy accused Special Counsel Jack Smith, who is overseeing the indictment, of making the case about the Jan. 6, Capitol riot as a way “to sell his case to the public,” despite the charges having no correlation with the riot.
“That was one of the most demagogic presentations I’ve ever seen in a high profile case,” McCarthy said of Smith’s statement about the indictment. “Anyone who listened to that, any normal person reacting to that would assume that Trump was alleged to have carried out the Capitol riot. The entire presentation that he made was not about what the core charges in his case are, it was about the Capitol riot and the security personnel who were in the Capitol riot … Then you turn to his indictment, he’s not charged with the Capitol riot.”
“So if that’s what he has to resort to in order to sell his case to the public, I think that’s very telling in terms of how compelling his case is,” Smith continued. “As far as the timeline is concerned, I think he’s going to have, if he’s a good judge, he’ll have a very hard case getting this case to trial.”
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