CNN legal analyst Elie Honig says prosecutors need to be prepared for Donald Trump’s attorneys to argue that his effort to overturn the 2020 election was based on legitimate evidence ― and they’ll need to be ready to prove it’s a load of “garbage.”
Honig was weighing in on news that Bernie Kerik, a former New York City Police Department commissioner who looked into bogus election fraud claims for Trump’s team after the 2020 election, had turned over thousands of pages of material to special counsel Jack Smith as part of the Justice Department’s election interference investigation into the former president.
“So, I think this is sort of the flip side of the intent issue,” Honig said of the development, “which is showing or disproving this argument that Donald Trump may make, that, ‘Well, some of my advisers brought me compelling evidence that there was fraud. And that’s why I went out trying to reverse this election.’”
While Trump’s team may try to leverage the material to support their case, Honig said, prosecutors can use it to demonstrate that the evidence Trump claimed he had was “nothing and unsubstantiated.”
“They need to know what’s in those documents,” he said of prosecutors. “And I think they need to be prepared to counteract those, to say, ‘This is nothing. This is a pile of useless garbage.’ A lot of courts found that, and I think prosecutors have to be ready for that defense.”
Trump and his team failed to produce any actual proof of electoral fraud, but invented numerous conspiracy theories and spread baseless accusations nonetheless. State and federal courts dismissed more than 50 lawsuits presented by Trump and his allies to challenge the outcome of the election.