CNN legal analyst says Special Counsel Jack Smith bent rules to get ‘cheap shot’ in on Trump before election

Special Counsel Jack Smith "bent ordinary procedure" to kneecap former President Trump after he failed to try the candidate before the November election, a legal analyst argued in a piece for New York magazine.

In Thursday's "Jack Smith's October Cheap Shot" essay, CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig analyzed Smith's decision to drop a 165-page federal court filing related to the issue of Trump's immunity from prosecution.

According to Honig, Smith successfully received permission from Judge Tanya Chutkan to file a 180-page-long brief — four times the normal maximum.

Honig noted that Chutkan now claims she does not care about the upcoming election despite earlier efforts to expedite Trump's immunity and get it in before Nov. 5. After redacting several names, she complied with Smith's request and made the rest of the brief public.

5 KEY DETAILS IN SPECIAL COUNSEL JACK SMITH'S TRUMP ELECTION CASE FILING

"The larger, if less obvious, headline is 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," Honig wrote.

He added that Smith's "unprincipled, norm-breaking practice" is neither a response nor an excuse to suggestions that voters should have the utmost information about presidential candidates before they cast their ballot.

In standard criminal procedure and under federal rules, a prosecutor first files an indictment, the defense makes a motion and then the prosecution responds to said motions. However, Honig said Smith turned these rules "on their head" when he asked Chutkan to file without a pending defense