Donald Trump livid as judge unseals document regarding election subversion case

A federal judge in Washington DC made public a 165-page filing by special counsel Jack Smith regarding the 2020 election subversion case on Wednesday. The result? A furious Donald Trump, questioned why the document was made public mere 34 days before Americans go to polling booths to cast their votes and elect the next president; Trump is in a painfully tight race with Vice President Kamala Harris.
The majority of Smith’s submitted motion was in response to the ruling earlier this year by the Supreme Court, noting that presidents and ex-presidents have “absolute” immunity from prosecution for any “official acts” while in office. The motion subtly highlighted publicly known facts about Trump and his allies’ actions after he was defeated by Joe Biden in the 2020 elections.
“The defendant [Trump] asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” the filing read. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.
“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.”
In response, Trump did what he does best. He took to Truth Social to post in all-caps his reaction: “FOR 60 DAYS PRIOR TO AN ELECTION, THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE IS SUPPOSED TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT WOULD TAINT OR INTERFERE WITH A CASE. THEY DISOBEYED THEIR OWN RULE IN FAVOUR OF COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE. I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID! THE CASE IS A SCAM, JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS, INCLUDING THE DOCUMENTS CASE, WHICH WAS DISMISSED!”
In a prior interview, the former president had argued that there is “nothing new” in the trove of filings and that the unsealing shouldn’t have happened, the New York Post reported.
“He’s a deranged person,” Trump added about the special counsel.
“[H]e is a person who is trying — and he works for Kamala, and he works for Joe,” the Republican presidential nominee said. “This was a weaponization of the government, and that’s why it was released 30 days before the election,” he continued. “And it’s nothing new in there, by the way. Nothing new.”
The former president took aim at the Biden-Harris administration for appointing Smith “to screw up the election for the Republican Party,” adding that the unsealing of the filing was a means to the same end.
“They should have never allowed the information to come before the public, but they did that because they want to hurt you before the election,” Trump said. “The public doesn’t buy it.”
Smith filed his reworked indictment against Trump in August in a bid to revive proceedings.
The now unsealed documents revealed that prosecutors argued that Trump’s alleged effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence to not certify the election happened in a private, unofficial manner, exempting the action from presidential immunity.
“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House Counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the filing said.
Prosecutors also pointed to the well-known incidents to prove Trump’s guilt. One was Trump’s infamous January 2, 2021, call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger highlighting the need to “find” 11,780 votes and efforts to produce a fake slate of electors.
Also listed were his efforts to overturn the election in other states like Arizona, Georgia, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
In the aftermath of the 2020 elections, Pence tried to privately discourage Trump from his stolen election narrative, urging him “not to look at the election ‘as a loss — just an intermission,’” according to prosecutors.
Smith has also argued that Trump’s phone calls with governors and other elected officials in Georgia and Arizona to not certify the election were conducted as Trump the candidate, not Trump the president.
The prosecution also noted that Trump only called officials in swing states with Republican governors and “made no efforts to contact equivalent individuals holding the same offices in Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, all of whom were Democrats.”
Smith drove his point home by noting that Trump, as president, “had no official role in the process by which states appointed and ascertained their presidential electors,” thus for him to be acting in an official capacity could not have been possible.
“The content, form and context of the defendant’s interactions with these state officials firmly establish that his conduct was unofficial,” Smith wrote.
The prosecution also made sure to highlight Trump’s numerous tirades after the election about the apparent election fraud.
“The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud,” Smith’s team noted.
“He raised fraud claims in this context—about whether he could still win Arizona—not in the larger context of election integrity,” Smith wrote. “This call â€æ was solely focused on the vote count in the presidential race and the defendant’s fraud claims.”
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan was unaffected by the numerous efforts Trump’s attorneys made to delay or block parts of the court filing now being made public. The attorneys noted that the document,if made public, could damage Trump’s chances in the 2024 presidential elections.
Chutkan determined in the past that Trump’s concerns about the political consequences of these proceedings would not bear on the pretrial schedule. Smith’s evidence against Trump was submitted only last week and Chutkan chose to redact parts of it and release it.
Chutkan will also make the ultimate decision on whether the case against Trump should move forward in light of the presidential immunity afforded.
Trump is facing another 10-count indictment over Georgia election tampering that is on hold due to a challenge against Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis.
Then there is the 40-count indictment over allegations that Trump illegally hoarded classified documents. The indictment was thrown out over the summer, but Smith has been working to revive it.
Trump in all the cases has denied wrongdoing and pleaded not guilty to all the pending charges.