Back in March, three in five Americans said they thought the federal trial on former President Donald Trump’s alleged 2020 election subversion should happen before the 2024 election. With weeks to go, the trial hasn’t happened – but a bunch of new documents related to it have just been released.
In between the release of those POLITICO/Ipsos poll results in March and today, the U.S. Supreme Court delivered a ruling about presidential immunity that could let Trump off the hook – maybe. It ruled he might be able to claim immunity for official actions taken while in the White House.
However, Special Counsel Jack Smith argued in a brief filed this fall that Trump can’t claim immunity.
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so,” Smith wrote. “Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”
Smith announced an indictment against Trump last summer, revealing that the former president and current GOP presidential candidate had been charged with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. These charges are related to Trump’s actions around the 2020 election, which he lost to current President Joe Biden.
Trump continues to make claims that the election was “stolen” from him, even though he has not been able to provide evidence to back these claims up. He held a “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, 2021, preceding the deadly Capitol riot fueled by people who sought to stop the certification of votes for Biden. Some of these rioters chanted “hang Mike Pence” when the former vice president said he couldn’t prevent the certification of votes.
Just this week, Trump called the violent riot a “day of love,” during a town hall event held by Univision.
According to CNN, Smith released nearly 2,000 heavily redacted pages of documents Friday related to the allegations against Trump. Although Trump tried to pause the release, Judge Tanya Chutkan rejected that bid.
“Trump argued that posting the documents now could be seen as election inference and had asked them to remain under seal until after Election Day,” CNN said. MSNBC published a copy of Chutkan’s order, filed Thursday.
Included in Smith’s release were Vice President Mike Pence’s letter to Congress explaining why he could not reject congressional certification of the election on Jan. 6. While that and much of the other information in the documents has already been made public, CNN noted that the release provides insight into what Smith is using to prosecute Trump.
New details also come from a transcript of the House January 6 committee’s 2022 interview with an unnamed White House employee. According to this transcript, the employee told Trump that TV networks had pulled away because people were rioting at the Capitol.
“I’m taking off his outer coat that he’s wearing right now, and I get the TV, like, ready for him, and hand him over the remote, and he starts watching it,” the employee said, per CNN’s report. “And I stepped out to get him a Diet Coke, come back in, and that’s pretty much it for me as he’s watching it and, like, seeing it for himself.”
Overall, CNN reported that the first volume of evidence contains excerpts of various House January 6 committee interviews and the second volume is filled with sealed pages as well as social media posts. Prosecutors have argued that the social media posts should be allowed for use in the trial because they were personal in nature or part of his campaigning efforts – not his official duties as president.
A third volume reportedly contains photos of signed fake elector certificates “that Trump allies hoped would help reverse the 2020 election results,” said CNN. It also contains photos of pages of Pence’s 2022 autobiography and the transcript from Trump’s January 2020 call with Georgia’s secretary of state.
Memos from lawyer John Eastman are included in a final volume. Eastman was identified as “an attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the vice president’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification of the presidential election,” who was listed as a co-conspirator in the indictment against Trump last summer.
These memos from Eastman cover the plan for Pence to reject the congressional certification of the 2020 election, CNN reported. In that final volume, there is also a “public statement Trump released the night before January 6 claiming he and Pence were on the same page about the congressional certification, Trump’s prepared remarks for his speech on January 6 and fundraising emails sent out by his 2020 campaign in the days before January 6.”
As of Saturday, Trump was closing his polling gap with the Democratic nominee for president, Vice President Kamala Harris.
According to FiveThirtyEight aggregates, Harris was polling at 48.4% to Trump’s 46.3% and The Hill’s Decision Desk gave Harris a 50% chance of winning. Betting data from Kalshi showed that bettors favored Trump as the winner at 57% to Harris’ 43% and The Virtual Tout Electoral College predictor forecast Trump getting 315 Electoral College votes to Harris’ 223.