Former federal prosecutor Cynthia Alksne remarked on MSNBC’s “The Katie Phang Show” early Saturday morning that special counsel Jack Smith has his work cut out for him when it comes to a Donald Trump criminal indictment for the Jan. 6 violence.
Concerning the Mar-a-Lago stolen papers investigation, Smith stated that she was given a ready-made case to take the former president to court as quickly as feasible.
Alksne told presenter Phang that the DOJ did not do a good job prosecuting Trump for the 2021 insurgency that led legislators to flee for their safety, but the Mar-a-Lago case is an entirely different story, as per Raw Story.
Addressing the FBI’s investigation of Trump’s Florida estate and the finding of documents that should not be in Trump’s hands after the National Archives was delayed, Phang prompted, “One is so much farther along in terms of the development of evidence. We’ve seen some of it already in public, for public consumption, why haven’t we seen charges here with respect to the hoarding of classified documents?”
“Well, I would guess that that was going to come pretty soon,” the former DOJ official quickly answered. “I mean, let’s face it, that’s an easy prosecution: you stole the documents, we’re asking for them, we ask you ‘pretty please,’ he said ‘no,’ you lied about it, you move them, and then we found them!”
“It’s a reasonably easy prosecution,” she elaborated. “There are a couple of outstanding things: one is, what is the obstruction? We know that, originally, they made the aide lie and didn’t say that he had moved the documents under Trump’s direction and then eventually flipped and did. Now, the question is was that flip, was that in any way coordinated? Without an obstruction by Trump or any of the lawyers as in, perhaps that Cassidy Hutchinson model with [attorney] Stefan Passantino.”
“They have to figure out that obstruction, and they also have to figure out, now that they have the documents, were they shared with anybody and what exactly happened with them — and that may take some time,” she continued. “But the truth of the matter is that it’s a relatively easy case, it could be prosecuted at any time, and I hope they do it before spring.”
