Jack Smith lays out his case against Trump in vivid detail

As his bid to hold on to power in 2020 grew increasingly desperate, Donald Trump pressed Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel to help promote a false claim that voting machines in Michigan had been manipulated.

McDaniel balked. She had spoken to the state’s House speaker, Lee Chatfield, a Republican, who told her the claim was “fucking nuts.”

That detail was among a dossier of evidenceunfurled Wednesday in a newly released legal brief by special counsel Jack Smith. The 165-page filing offers the most detailed look at Smith’s case charging Trump with orchestrating multiple criminal conspiracies in his failed quest to subvert Joe Biden’s victory.

The filing is replete with new revelations about the alleged scheme drawn from interviews with key figures such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows.

“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith's prosecutors wrote. “The through line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

The filing is a blueprint of the evidence the special counsel hopes to present to a jury some day. The trial in the case had been scheduled to begin earlier this year, but the Supreme Court delayed the proceedings by eight months while it weighed Trump’s claim that he was immune from the charges.

The high court’s ruling endorsed a sweeping view of presidential immunity and tasked the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, with reviewing Smith’s evidence to determine whether any of it should be barred from consideration. That process could take months to resolve and likely result in yet another trip to the Supreme Court.

Smith’s new filing is squarely aimed at showing Trump’s conduct in 2020 was taken in his capacity as a candidate for office — not in his official capacity as president. As a result, the special counsel argues, Trump’s conduct should not be protected by immunity.

Smith submitted the sprawling legal brief to Chutkan last week, but it remained sealed until Wednesday. Over Trump’s objection, Chutkan publicly released a redacted version of the filing.

The filing contains details of private conversations Trump engaged in with Republican legislators and operatives throughout the post-election period in 2020, describing how they nearly all warned him that his allegations of election fraud were flimsy and false.

Smith also accuses Trump of intentionally stoking the fury of the mob that ransacked the Capitol and assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021. Once Pence refused to join the alleged conspiracy, the special counsel alleges, Trump realized his only option to cling to power was to derail Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.

Smith reveals that Trump was alone in the Oval Office dining room when he issued an incendiary tweet about Pence during some of the most violent moments of the attack. Rioters — some of them chanting “hang Mike Pence!” — amplified the tweet, which accused Pence of lacking “the courage to do what should have been done.”

Many of the new details in the filing are clearly the result of interviews Smith’s team conducted with people who spoke directly to Trump during the critical two-month period between Election Day and Jan. 6 — and phone records confirm. When many of Trump’s aides and other fellow Republicans responded to his false claims with skepticism or outright repudiation, Trump responded with a mix of private pressure and public attacks, prosecutors say.

Trump’s lawyers aggressively fought Smith’s request to file the compilation of evidence with the court and opposed placing it on the public record. However, Chutkan ordered the release of the filing Wednesday with limited redactions. Though most names are blacked out in the public version of the document, many people can be identified from the context in which they are mentioned.

Trump responded angrily to the judge’s decision, firing off a series of messages on his Truth Social account, asserting without evidence that Smith’s prosecutors are driven by politics.

"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,” Trump wrote, blasting the case as an “Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes."

Trump’s claim about the timing of the document’s release ignores the fact that it was Chutkan, not prosecutors, who controlled when it was made public.

Much of the new filing is devoted to arguing that many of Trump’s actions following Election Day were political or private in nature, and thus shouldn’t be considered part of the official duties a president may be entitled to immunity for. Smith’s submission also seems to have been prepared with an eye to the issue returning to the Supreme Court.

The filing quotes from a concurring opinion Justice Amy Coney Barrett wrote on the immunity issue earlier this year, echoing her position that there is “no plausible argument” that the alleged effort by Trump to organize false slates of electors was related to Trump’s official duties.

Smith notes that many of Trump’s conversations with Pence were in their “private capacities as running mates,” rather than discussions of Pence’s official duties on Jan. 6.

The new filing includes other developments, including allegations that additional individuals acted as co-conspirators with Trump, even though they were not among the six individuals referenced but unnamed in Smith’s original indictment last year and a revised indictment he issued in August in response to the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling. None of the alleged co-conspirators other than Trump are charged in the case.

In her order Wednesday releasing Smith’s filing, Chutkan also took a swipe at Trump’s lawyers, faulting them for littering their briefs with claims that prosecutors were engaged in “bad-faith partisan bias.”

“These accusations, for which Defendant provides no support, continue a pattern of defense filings focusing on political rhetoric rather than addressing the legal issues at hand,” Chutkan wrote. “Not only is that focus unresponsive and unhelpful to the court, but it is also unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case.”