Special counsel Jack Smith's 165-page report on former President Donald Trump's alleged connections with the Jan. 6 Capitol protests, which was released last week by a federal judge, was a "temper tantrum from a deranged fanatic," according to Sen. Tom Cotton.
“This is unverified, un-cross-examined hearsay from grand jury testimony, which usually isn’t revealed publicly for that reason," the Arkansas Republican told NBC News' “Meet the Press" Sunday, according to Politico.
"He went to court," Cotton added. "He asked for special permission to file a brief that’s four times as long as a normal brief and to have it disclosed less than 30 days before the election … This is professional misconduct in all likelihood by Jack Smith and it should be investigated."
Smith argued in his legal brief that Trump is not immune from the charges in connection with the protests because they did not fall under his official scope as a president, but were privately motivated.
"Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was a fundamentally private one," the Smith document stated.
But Cotton stressed that Trump told protesters to be peaceful and patriotic with their actions at the Capitol, and called Smith's document release "a perfect example of actual election interference."
"Jack Smith [is] violating Department of Justice regulations to try to get out as much unverified so-called evidence as he has because he’s angry that he lost and the Democrats don’t think they can beat Donald Trump on issues like inflation and immigration," Cotton said Sunday.
Cotton, meanwhile, said he accepts that President Joe Biden was elected president over Trump in 2020, but he still thinks the election was not fair.
"You had states that were changing their election practices or election laws, sometimes in violation of the Constitution," he said. "You had networks combining with Big Tech to suppress what we now know to be a truthful story about Hunter Biden’s laptop and the evidence that it exposed about Biden family corruption."
Sandy Fitzgerald ✉
Sandy Fitzgerald has more than three decades in journalism and serves as a general assignment writer for Newsmax covering news, media, and politics.
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