CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig on Friday said he is unaware of “any precedent” for Judge Tanya Chutkan releasing redacted documents of special counsel Jack Smith’s evidence against former President Donald Trump, given the November election is approaching.
Trump objected to publishing the materials so close to the election, but Chutkan argued it would be “election interference” not to release them. Honig, on “CNN News Central,” asserted whether the release constitutes interference is a matter of interpretation.
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“I can’t think of any precedent where a court has released something … two weeks and change before our presidential election. Judge Chutkan does take that issue on in her ruling. She essentially says, ‘If I were to pause this, that would be out of the ordinary. And so I’m going to just conduct business in the normal course.’ It’s really just in the eye of the beholder, Alex,” Honig told host Alex Marquardt. “I think Donald Trump’s team says, ‘Why wouldn’t you just keep this under seal for 18 or 20 more days, not have to deal with the election?’”
“That’s actually what happened in the hush money case. The judge over there said, ‘I’m not going to sentence you a couple weeks before the election. We’re just going to punt it until the end of November.’ Trump’s team said that Judge Chutkan should do the same,” he added. “Judge Chutkan disagreed. Judge Chutkan said, ‘If I were to change the ordinary schedule in order to not drop this before the election,’ she says that would be election interference. It’s very much a Rorschach test.”
The evidence consists of four heavily redacted appendix documents totaling over 1,800 pages filed in the public docket, featuring public information like Trump’s tweets, communications records and segments of Jan. 6 committee testimony.
“If the court withheld information that the public otherwise had a right to access solely because of the potential political consequences of releasing it, that withholding could itself constitute — or appear to be — election interference,” Chutkan wrote in an order Thursday night. “The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests.”
Chutkan also published Smith’s lengthy motion on presidential immunity on Oct. 2, which detailed the evidence the special counsel would introduce at trial. Honig subsequently took to CNN’s airwaves to call the release “unusual” and he wrote an article about it headlined “Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot” in the Intelligencer.
Trump’s attorneys objected to publishing any of the documents, arguing it amounts to “overt and inappropriate election interference.”
“There should be no further disclosures at this time of the so called ‘evidence’ that the Special Counsel’s Office has unlawfully cherry-picked and mischaracterized — during early voting in the 2024 Presidential election — in connection with an improper Presidential immunity filing that has no basis in criminal procedure or judicial precedent,” his attorneys wrote in an Oct. 10 filing.
Featured Image Credit: Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America
