After Republican-appointed justices on the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that presidents cannot be prosecuted for their official acts, it fell to special counsel Jack Smith to tweak one of his cases against Donald Trump. Specifically, the prosecutor and his team had to tell a federal court that the indictment against the former president for his alleged election-related crimes can continue, regardless of the high court’s controversial decision.
Last week, Smith’s office submitted a court filing, not only explaining why the criminal charges remain on firm ground, but also offering new details about the merits of the case. For obvious reasons, the Republican candidate, who has denied any wrongdoing, did not want this court filing to reach the public during the election season.
A federal judge unsealed it anyway. (You can read it here.)
Broadly speaking, there are a handful of angles to the story. The first is the legal dimension, as prosecutors take careful steps to protect their case and explain why Trump’s post-defeat plot must not be seen as an official presidential act.
The second angle is the scope of the new revelations. Politico had an excellent report chronicling some of the most notable details, though NBC News’ report highlighted an especially memorable quote from the former president, which helped summarize his post-defeat perspective in a tidy and important way.
Another piece of evidence Smith’s team plans to introduce is testimony from an unnamed assistant to the president who overheard a remark Trump made to family members aboard Marine One after the 2020 election. ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,’ Trump allegedly said. ‘You still have to fight like hell.’”
But the other angle to keep in mind is the timing of these developments. The Washington Post had a good report along these lines, noting that the court filing “at the very least served as a late reminder of an ugly, Trump-inspired episode, with just more than a month to go before voters decided whether to return him to the White House.”
Those reminders and new details have been few and far between since the Jan. 6 committee wrapped up its business nearly two years ago. Trump hasn’t appeared to pay any real political price for his four indictments, which include a financial fraud conviction in Manhattan. But many casual voters appear to be unfamiliar with these cases, and the race is looking extremely close. That makes the new disclosures untimely for Trump.”
I can appreciate why this might seem difficult for well-informed news consumers to believe, but a significant chunk of the population no longer remembers Jan. 6 or the GOP nominee’s efforts to overturn the will of his own country’s voters.
I’m reminded of a report from Columbia Journalism Review, which spoke to Celinda Lake, one of the leading pollsters who worked on President Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign, who was stunned during a focus group session earlier this year with swing voters.
According to the report, Lake had asked how the voters felt about Trump’s indictment related to Jan. 6. “They go, ‘What court case around Jan. 6?’” the pollster recalled. “These were swing voters, and about half of them weren’t sure what we were talking about. And I said, ‘Well, you know, the insurrection and that he was the one that provoked it.’ They go, ‘Oh, yeah. I kind of forgot about that.’” A few months later, a national poll from Yahoo News and YouGov found an astonishing number of Americans were unfamiliar with the criminal cases against the former president. Many voters don’t know a jury found Trump guilty of 34 felonies. They don’t know that a different jury found Trump liable for sexual abuse. They don’t know that a separate court found that Trump oversaw a business that engaged in systemic fraud. And they don’t know that federal prosecutors have charged Trump with a variety of felonies related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. As Election Day nears and early voting gets underway across much of the country, Smith’s filing offers a timely reminder.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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