Washington, D.C. On Thursday, under seal, special counsel Jack Smith filed a court brief that prosecutors said would include sensitive and never-before-seen evidence in the case against former President Donald Trump for planning to overturn the 2020 election he lost.
The brief, which was sent even though the Trump team didn’t want it, is meant to defend a revised and narrowed charge that prosecutors filed last month in response to a Supreme Court decision that gave former presidents broad immunity.
Earlier this month, prosecutors said they were going to give U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan a “detailed factual proffer” that included several exhibits and excerpts of grand jury testimony. They wanted to convince her that the remaining charges in the new indictment should not be thrown out and should remain part of the case.
Peter Carr, a spokesman for the Smith team, stated that the prosecutors had turned in their brief by the due date of 5 p.m.
The brief isn’t available to the public right now, but prosecutors have said they will file a redacted version that could be made public later. This means that claims from the case that haven’t been seen before could become public in the last few weeks before the November election.
The Trump campaign has strongly opposed the filing, saying it is not needed and could lead to nasty details being made public during the “sensitive” time before the election.
Trump’s lawyers wrote that the court did not need 180 pages of “great assistance” from the Special Counsel’s Office to build the record needed to deal with Trump’s Presidential immunity defense. They called it “tantamount to a premature and improper Special Counsel report.”
The brief is the first part of a restructured criminal case after the Supreme Court said in July that past presidents are not immune for things they do in their personal lives but are for things they do while they are in office.
In the new indictment, Smith’s team dropped some claims about Trump’s interactions with the Justice Department but kept the main parts of the case. They said that the remaining actions, such as telling Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, to refuse to certify the counting of electoral votes, do not deserve immunity.
The indictment includes claims that Trump took part in a scheme to use fake voters in battleground states he lost. Chutkan is now in charge of choosing which parts of the indictment are official and can’t be prosecuted and which parts are private.
She knows that more appeals to the Supreme Court are expected to be made against her decisions.
