U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan for the District of Columbia unsealed a significant filing in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election case against former President Trump on Wednesday. Chutkan released Smith’s 165-page document, in which he outlines the case and the alleged evidence he plans to present in a future trial against Trump. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges brought against him by Smith.
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. As a result, Smith was required to file a new indictment against Trump, revising the charges to align with the Supreme Court’s ruling. The updated indictment retained the previous criminal charges but narrowed and reframed the allegations against Trump following the high court’s decision, which granted broad immunity to former presidents. Trump pleaded not guilty to all charges in the new indictment as well, Fox News reported.
In the filing unsealed Wednesday, Smith outlines a “factual proffer,” alleging Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office” after losing the 2020 presidential election. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” the filing said.
“His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification,” the filing noted further.
It should be noted that Trump left office on Jan. 20, 2021, willingly, as he was required to do. His efforts to question the election results in those battleground states largely stemmed from reports that election laws were unconstitutionally changed just a few months prior to Election Day. Also, Trump has a First Amendment right to dispute results, as Democrats have done during each GOP victory in the 21st century.
Smith claims that the “throughline of these efforts was deceit,” saying that Trump and co-conspirators “engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Fox News Digital the release of the “falsehood-ridden, unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election.” He added: “Deranged Jack Smith and Washington DC Radical Democrats are hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power. President Trump is dominating, and the Radical Democrats throughout the Deep State are freaking out. This entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes.”
Last month, Chutkan announced that she would not schedule the trial for Trump on charges arising from Smith’s Jan. 6 investigation until after the 2024 presidential election. She established deadlines for responses and documentation from federal prosecutors and Trump’s legal team for November 7—two days after Election Day.
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