There are still plenty of pending criminal charges against Donald Trump, including special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment related to the former president’s efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 election. The developments in that case are still unfolding in provocative ways. NBC News reported:
Former President Donald Trump was “fundamentally” acting as a private candidate for office and not as president of the United States when he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss, special counsel Jack Smith’s team argued in a filing on Wednesday that revealed new details of the scheme at the heart of Trump’s federal election interference case.
The full court filing, with redactions, has been published online.
In late August, prosecutors filed a superseding indictment — written to accommodate a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity — and charged the former president anew with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
It was against this backdrop that the special counsel’s office last week submitted a 165-page filing, under seal, explaining how and why the case should proceed, despite the Republican-appointed justices’ findings.
Trump and his team were not eager for this filing to reach the public ahead of Election Day. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan has now unsealed it anyway.
With this in mind, the newly unsealed court filing makes the case that the Supreme Court’s ruling does not negate the criminal allegations pending against the former president. “At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one; he extensively used private actors and his Campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office,” the filing argued.
Along the same lines, prosecutors added, “Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”
As a political matter, the problem for the GOP nominee and his party is not just that the criminal case is ongoing, and that Smith and prosecutors believe they can secure a conviction regardless of the Supreme Court’s controversial recent ruling on presidential immunity. Making matters worse is that this court filing (a) reminds voters during an election season that Trump is an accused felon; and (b) adds new details to the charges that Americans haven’t before seen or heard.
For example, a White House aide, after learning that then-Vice President Mike Pence had been taken to a secure location during the pro-Trump riot, rushed to tell Trump in the hopes that he’d care. He did not. “So what?” Trump replied, according to prosecutors. Similarly, a member of the then-president’s legal team tried to give Trump an “honest assessment,” not only of his election defeat, but also of the fact that his lies about the results would not withstand court scrutiny. The Republican apparently didn’t care about that, either. “The details don’t matter,” the court filing quotes Trump saying. Just as importantly, as NBC News’ report added, prosecutors believe they have evidence that the then-president told his team that he “would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and a winner was projected,” indifferent to the election’s actual outcome, and Trump publicly began laying the groundwork by telling his supporters he’d only lose if there were fraud. These are exactly the sort of allegations the Republican ticket hoped to keep under wraps with 34 days remaining before Election Day. The information is now reaching the electorate anyway.
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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