Former President Donald Trump’s attorney-spokeswoman, Alina Habba, said during an interview on Wednesday that special counsel Jack Smith ought to be “scared” following a setback suffered at the U.S. Supreme Court in a case involving her client.
Smith, who filed court documents calling for former President Donald Trump to be banned from making “political attacks” in his upcoming trial, may have committed a “due process violation,” Habba told fill-in Newsmax host and former Trump administration official Sebastian Gorka.
“They do it in the form of a gag order,” Habba said. “He doesn’t want, basically, any defense being brought by the defense. It’s what happened with the last trial I tried. It’s what will happen with the next one I try.”
Judges, Habba said, will “gag you” while trying to use Trump’s “popularity and his voice as a way to work against us and the American people so that people cannot hear the truth.”
In court papers filed on Wednesday, Smith argued that “Trump should be barred during his federal trial on election subversion charges from telling jurors that he is being selectively prosecuted,” Newsmax reported.
“Through public statements, filings, and argument in hearings before the court, the defense has attempted to inject into this case partisan political attacks and irrelevant and prejudicial issues that have no place in a jury trial,” senior assistant special counsel Molly Gaston wrote in the papers. “Although the court can recognize these efforts for what they are and disregard them, the jury — if subjected to them — may not.”
Trump’s so-called ‘election interference’ trial is scheduled to begin March 4.
“That’s saying you cannot put your own defense,” Habba said. “That’s like saying you can’t have an expert on the [New York Attorney General] Letitia James case or gagging his lawyers, which has happened to me. I was gagged in the courtroom. I could not put on a defense on the record for the appellate division. I couldn’t say things that needed to be said. That is what our country has come to.”
Habba added that Smith was “running scared” when he tried, unsuccessfully, to get the Supreme Court to rule quickly on whether Trump was covered by presidential immunity during events that took place on Jan. 6, 2021.
“The only urgency that Jack Smith has, and all of them have, is election interference and trying to stop him before November 2024, which clearly they cannot do,” said Habba. “If you look at the polls, the American people, the independents, are switching because they see what is happening, and they’re afraid.”
She also argued that if judges were to merely begin to apply applicable laws in Trump’s myriad of cases, “they would see that he has done nothing wrong. The only thing that’s going wrong is these [George] Soros-backed AGs and DAs that are trying to make a name for themselves.”
Habba added that James is “absolutely determined to take him down ant any cost because the Trump name gets you votes whether you’re for him or against him. He is an epic individual and this is really political motivation in lawfare.”
