On Wednesday, a federal judge made public Special Counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page legal brief detailing Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s alleged criminal activities in connection with the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. On Sunday, Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas called the move “a tantrum from a deranged fanatic” on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
“These are unverified, uninvestigated hearsay from grand jury testimony, which for that reason is usually not revealed publicly,” Cotton (R-Ark.) told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker. “He went to court. He asked for special permission to submit a briefing four times as long as a normal briefing and to make it public less than 30 days before the election. This is in all likelihood professional misconduct by Jack Smith and must be investigated.”
In Smith’s legal brief, he argued that Trump is not immune from accusations of orchestrating multiple criminal conspiracy theories, despite the Supreme Court’s summer ruling that granted presidents broad immunity from official acts. “Although the defendant was the sitting president during the accused conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally private,” Smith and his team wrote in detail about the evidence collected.
Cotton emphasized that Trump did not incite violence during the riots, but instructed demonstrators to be peaceful and patriotic. He said Smith’s claims are “unverified, uninvestigated rumors.”
“This is a perfect example of actual election interference, where Jack Smith is breaking Justice Department rules to try to release as much unverified so-called evidence as he has because he’s angry that he lost and the Democrats don’t think they can beat Donald. Trump on issues like inflation and immigration,” Cotton said.
One point from Smith’s files was Trump telling his daughter and son-in-law, “It doesn’t matter whether you won or lost the election. You still have to fight hard,” said a Trump White House official who overheard him.
When asked if Cotton would definitively say Trump lost the 2020 election, Cotton said President Joe Biden was elected president in 2020 but called it an unfair election.
“You had states changing their election practices or election laws, sometimes in violation of the Constitution,” he said. “You had networks combined with big tech to suppress what we now know to be a true story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the evidence it uncovered about the Biden family’s corruption.”
Cotton added, “As a result, everything has gone to hell,” citing inflation, rising and immigration rates.
