Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The past, present, and future of disinformation

We begin today with Perry Stein and Rachel Weiner of The Washington Post reporting about the a motion filed yesterday by Special Counsel Jack Smith to prevent “irrelevant disinformation” from being included in Trump’s arguments for his defense.

Special counsel Jack Smith filed on Wednesday what is known as a motion in limine, urging U.S. District Judge Tanya S. Chutkan to prohibit Trump from including certain arguments in his defense. Such filings are common in legal proceedings and aim to eliminate arguments at trial that prosecutors say are not supported by evidence or are irrelevant to the case, and could mislead jurors.[...]

Prosecutors have filed similar motions in many of the hundreds of trials of people charged with storming the Capitol on Jan. 6. In those cases, prosecutors have typically sought to prohibit defense attorneys from arguing that their clients were exercising their First Amendment rights when they broke into the Capitol or that the police — acting as part of some sort of conspiracy — allowed the riot to happen.

The federal judges overseeing the cases at U.S. District Court in D.C. generally agree to those requests, unless a defendant testifies that he or she personally saw police allow rioters into the building. As Chutkan put it when presiding over the trial of Antony Vo in September, a defendant “can’t speculate as to what other people might have been doing. … He can simply say what he saw and what his observations led him to believe.”

Since most of the punditry (other than breaking news) is being devoted to retrospectives about 2023, the APR will look at some of the year-end stories about one of the greatest problems that world society faced in 2023: misinformation and disinformation. 

We’ll continue across the fold with Marcy Wheeler.