It is no wonder that Biden Special Counsel Jack Smith did everything he could to rush to a D.C. trial of President Trump prior to the 2024 election. Regardless of the merits of his case, Smith knew that he had a conviction in the bag based on the composition of the jury pool. He took extraordinary measures to secure a pre-election trial, even attempting to bypass the appellate court to obtain faster Supreme Court review during President Trump’s pretrial immunity appeal. Smith’s belief was well-founded; for instance, a D.C. jury recently had acquitted Michael Sussmann, a Perkins Coie lawyer, for plainly false statements made to Special Counsel John Durham during the probe of the Russiagate investigation. A rabidly partisan D.C. civil jury hammered former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani with a $148 million defamation judgment for statements he had made about election workers concerning their work in the 2020 presidential election.