CNN legal analyst Elie Honig pushed back on comments made by failed Donald Trump opponent Hillary Clinton in support of special prosecutor Jack Smith's unusual 165-page motion in the Trump election interference case over the weekend.

Honig wrote an op-ed on Thursday for New York Magazine in which he said the brief, which dealt with the issue of Trump's immunity in the case, was "procedurally irregular."

"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.

Honig compared Smith's filing to James Comey's announcement about Clinton's private email server on the eve of the 2016 election.

"Completely different"

"Anyone who objected to James Comey’s outrageous announcements about the Hillary Clinton email investigation on the eve of the 2016 election should feel the same about Smith’s conduct now," he wrote.

But Clinton rejected the comparison, saying in a subsequent interview, "I think the situation is completely different, and this is in the context of an ongoing criminal procedure that the special counsel has brought against Donald Trump many, many months before the run-up to the election. It was, frankly, motivated by the orders of the judge in this trial, who has, it appears to me, been extremely favorable toward Trump, so I think that there is nothing out of the ordinary."

Not only did Honig argue that Smith's filing was completely out of the ordinary, he pointed out that Clinton mixed up the judges in the different cases against Trump.

"Well, all respect to Secretary Clinton, she’s the one who suffered the consequences for James Comey’s, I believe, outrageous conduct in 2016; DOJ found later that it was outrageous. The problem, though, with Secretary Clinton’s analysis of the Jack Smith case is, respectfully, she’s got her facts wrong," Honig said.

She's just wrong

"I think she’s thinking of Judge Cannon, who, yes, has ruled almost entirely for Donald Trump. But that’s the judge in the other case. The judge here is Judge Chutkan. I get it, similar names — Judge Chutkan has ruled almost entirely against Donald Trump," he said.

Honig further argued that Smith "flipped this procedure" and filed his brief out of order.

"They reversed the actual way that motions are done. You can talk to a hundred former federal prosecutors who’ve collectively handled 100,000 cases. They will all tell you they never filed their motions first. And I think it begs the question, what was the rush here? Why did Jack Smith have to ask for this, to quote Judge Chutkan, procedurally irregular approach?" Honig said. "So, I respectfully disagree with the secretary there."

Fox News legal expert Jonathan Turley agreed with Honig's estimation that Smith's brief was an attempt at election interference.

Turley called it Smith's "closing election argument to voters because he knows that the 2024 election will be the largest jury verdict in history."

The ploy may backfire with voters, Turley said, because the "weaponization of the legal system is central to this election."