Joyce Vance Explains How Jack Smith Boxed In Trump's Defense

Joe Scarborough asked Joyce Vance to walk them through the indictment.

"What should we expect to see over the next several months?" he said.

"What we will see will be the beginning of the process we would see in any prosecution. There will be an exchange of discovery by the prosecution to the defendant. It primarily goes that direction in criminal cases. We will see Donald Trump file a flurry, very likely, of pretrial motions designed to challenge the legally of the indictment. We can expect to see that full range of claims that we have seen him seemingly try on in public over the last few months.

"But this indictment is crafted in a highly strategic fashion that makes those sorts of defenses irrelevant to the debate. Jack Smith makes it clear as he designs this indictment. The former president is charged with his conduct and not his speech. there will be no sort of a First Amendment defense that will work against these charges. In all things, he seems to have been deliberate about all the charges he selected and about the fact he uses to underline them so they could take away some of the defenses we are talking about, and one is that Donald Trump acted on what he believed to be true, that he won the election," she said.

"It comes down to willful blindness. Everybody around him told him that he lost. he exhausted all his legal avenues for challenging that. And that's the point where Jack Smith strikes, and charges him with criminal conduct."

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