Special counsel Jack Smith on Monday laid out his plan to have an expert witness testify in Donald Trump’s federal election interference case about data extracted from the former president’s phone.
Smith’s plan, outlined in a court filing, gives us a sense of the potential treasure trove of information available to the special counsel’s team as it investigated Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 election.
The filing notifies Trump’s attorneys of three expert witnesses expected to be called by the prosecution. The first one has expertise in “the interpretation and visual representation of geographic location data,” according to the filing.
Smith’s team wrote:
Specifically, Expert 1 plotted the location history data for Google accounts and devices associated with individuals who moved, on January 6, 2021, from an area at or near the Ellipse to an area encompassing the United States Capitol building. His/her testimony will describe and explain the resulting graphical representations of that data, and it will aid the jury in understanding the movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse.
We don’t know what prosecutors plan to show with this expert’s testimony but it’s possible Smith is hoping to demonstrate the extent to which Trump’s instruction for his supporters to disrupt the vote count by marching to the Capitol motivated them to do just that.
The second witness referred to in Monday’s filing is an expert in “the analysis of location data and location history data, including Google location history data.” This individual can help the jury understand individuals’ movements toward the Capitol during and after Trump’s speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, prosecutors wrote.
And the third witness could end up being the most damaging to Trump, in my view. The Justice Department says this expert will bring knowledge regarding “the analysis of cellular phone data, including the use of Twitter and other…
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