CNN’s Elie Honig Calls Out Hillary Clinton For Getting ‘Her Facts Wrong’ on ‘Cheap Shot’ Against Trump In January 6 Case

CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig called out former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton for getting “her facts wrong” in her defense of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s latest filing against Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump over the weekend.

Last week, Honig excoriated Smith over his bombshell, 165-page filing against Trump in his federal election interference case, arguing that “Smith has essentially abandoned any pretense; he’ll bend any rule, switch up on any practice – so long as he gets to chip away at Trump’s electoral prospects.”

“At this point, there’s simply no defending Smith’s conduct on any sort of principled or institutional basis,” he wrote in a column for New York Magazine headlined “Jack Smith’s October Cheap Shot.” In particular, Honig expressed his disagreement with Smith’s submission of the filing before the defense was given a chance to make a motion.

“Smith turned the well-established, thoroughly uncontroversial rules of criminal procedure on their head and asked Judge [Tanya] Chutkan for permission to file first – even with no actual defense motion pending,” added Honig, who previously served as a federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York. “Smith’s proactive filing is prejudicial to Trump, legally and politically. It’s ironic. Smith has complained throughout the case that Trump’s words might taint the jury pool.”

Honig has also compared Smith’s actions to those of former FBI Director James Comey, who announced he was reopening an investigation into Clinton’s use of a private email server just days before the 2016 election.

Clinton responded to that comparison in an interview on CNN’s Smerconish Saturday, saying:

I think the situation is completely different. And this is in the context of an ongoing criminal procedure that the special counsel has brought against Donald Trump many, many months before the run up to the election. It was, frankly, motivated by the orders of the judge in this trial, who has, it appears to me, been extremely favorable toward Trump. So I think that there is nothing out of the ordinary.

Honig shot down Clinton’s argument during a segment on CNN Sunday.

“”Well, all to respect Secretary Clinton, she’s the one who suffer the consequences for James Comey’s, I believe, outrageous conduct in 2016; DOJ found later that it was outrageous. The problem, though, with Secretary Clinton’s analysis of the Jack Smith case is, respectfully, she’s got her facts wrong,” he began after listening to her comments. “First of all, she’s confusing the judges here. I think she’s thinking of Judge [Aileen] Cannon, who, yes, has ruled almost entirely for Donald Trump. But that’s the judge in the other case. The judge here is Judge Chutkan. I get it, similar names — Judge Chutkan has ruled almost entirely against Donald Trump.”

“More to the point, the last thing we just heard Secretary Clinton say was, quote, ‘There is nothing out of the ordinary.’ But as I described before, the way they flip this procedure is the opposite of the ordinary,” he continued. “They reversed the actual way that motions are done. You can talk to 100 former federal prosecutors who’ve collectively handled 100,000 cases. They will all tell you they never filed their motions first. And I think it begs the question, what was the rush here? Why did Jack Smith have to ask for this, to quote Judge Chutkan, ‘procedurally irregular approach?’ So I respectfully disagree with the secretary there.”

Watch above via CNN.