Judge Tanya Chutkan released a redacted version of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s brief examining alleged evidence of why former President Donald Trump is not subjected to presidential 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,” Smith’s brief reads. “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.”
Smith argues that Trump’s claims of immunity are “private,” not “presidential.”
“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one; he extensively used private actors and his Campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”
According to Chutkan, there is “no support” for Trump’s attorney’s claims that the government is driven by a partisan “bad-faith” 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,” she 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.”
Trump condemned the brief.
“Democrats are Weaponizing the Justice Department against me because they know I am WINNING, and they are desperate to prop up their failing Candidate, Kamala Harris. The DOJ pushed out this latest ‘hit job’ today because JD Vance humiliated Tim Walz last night in the Debate,” he wrote on Truth Social Wednesday. “The DOJ has become nothing more than an extension of Joe’s, and now Kamala’s, Campaign. This is egregious PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT, and should not have been released right before the Election. The Democrat Party is turning America into a Third World Country that tries to censor, harass, and intimidate their Political Opponents. What they have done to our Justice System is one of the Great, All Time, Tragedies….”
