Former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann was asked on the latest episode of the Pod Saves America podcast what would give him sleepless nights prosecuting former President Donald Trump.
“Annulment by the jury,” he replied.
“What I’ve experienced is the problem in a high-profile case with a jury who wants to be on the jury and is anything but sincere, which is a nice way of saying ‘lying,'” Weissmann, who is now a legal analyst at MSNBC, told co-host Dan Pfeiffer.
“Typically, most jurors don’t want to be on a jury,” Weissmann noted during a discussion of Trump’s possible impeachment indictment as part of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021 US Capitol attack.
“But the problem with high-profile matters is that someone really wants to sneak up on you who has no intention of honoring their jury oath of office,” he said.
“It only takes one juror to have an independent jury,” he continued. “Even if it’s 11-1 for the conviction,” Trump could still claim it was “a huge win.”
“So that would be what would worry me the most,” he added. “The evidence seems incredibly strong. That’s the biggest thing I would worry about.”
Trump claimed on Tuesday that he had “a target letter‘ by the Special Prosecutor. The former president said he was given “a very short four days to report to the grand jury, which almost always means an arrest and indictment.”
Trump has been indicted earlier this year for alleged mishandling of classified documents, is on trial in 2024 in the Stormy Daniels hush money case and remains under investigation for his efforts to overturn the Georgia 2020 election result.
Watch the full podcast episode here: