Carrie Johnson
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Jack Smith presided over two criminal indictments of Trump for attempting to overturn the 2020 election and for hiding secret documents at his Florida resort.
Neither case got to a jury before Trump returned to the White House last year.
Smith says he had proof beyond a reasonable doubt in both cases and that he was not motivated by politics.
He says if he had any regrets, it was not expressing enough support for the prosecutors and FBI agents who worked on the cases.
Many of those public servants have been fired by the Trump administration.
Some have faced threats, he says, for doing their jobs.
Carrie Johnson, NPR News, Washington.
Well, the situation in Minneapolis is really highlighting some of these aggressive tactics of the Trump administration.
There's new polling this week out from a couple of outfits.
A Quinnipiac poll found that 57% disapprove of the way that ICE is enforcing immigration laws.
53% said that they don't think that the shooting was justified, while only 35% say that it was.
And this has become the real problem for Trump on something that had been an advantage with immigration.
You know, people may be in favor of deporting criminals who are in the country illegally, but they've also been saying for months that they see this administration's approach as going too far or acting too harshly when it comes to deportations.
And that's been dragging down Trump's numbers overall on immigration.
Yeah, and I have to say from a raw politics perspective, I mean, do Republicans really want to elevate the profiles of people like Mark Kelly, the senator from Arizona, or Alyssa Slotkin, the senator from Michigan?
They're two of the more moderate members of the Democratic caucus.
She's talking about an astronaut, a former CIA analyst.
I mean, they'd cut pretty good profiles for 2028 candidates.
And I'd venture to say that if not for how the Trump administration has gone after them, Kelly in particular would not likely be somebody who's as much part of the 2028 process.
conversation as he is now.