Bryan Zepp Jamieson
October 2nd, 2024
Jack Smith’s new 167-page filing against Donald Trump contains several bombshells.
Trump, of course, was hoping his lunatic pet fascists on the Supreme Court would give him full immunity against any actions he performed as President. But even his six corrupt right wingers knew they had to figleaf their ruling to give it a pretense of Constitutional law, and they stipulated that immunity only applied to “official acts.” Still “law” on the level of the Dredd Scott decision, but it was enough.
Very little of Trump’s activities between the month or so prior to the election and January 6th fell under the aegis of ‘official acts.’ Even after the Supreme Court decided the United States needed a king instead of a president, most of his activities were flat-out illegal.
So Smith rewrote his filing to stipulate that Trump’s actions did not fall under the official duties of a president. While you can argue that various presidents in American history would have been delighted to see their vice presidents lynched, it is, in fact, not an official presidential duty. The constitution is curiously mute on the issue of when it is proper for a president to have his first-in-line murdered even though at the time of the Constitution, the vice president was whoever got the second-most votes. “Uneasy lies the head,” indeed!
Of course, the endless delays meant that Smith had more time to broaden his investigation and include new allegations in his superseding document. The delays were caused, not by Smith but by Trump, who hoped to delay it all past the election, where hopefully he would win or steal a second term and fire Jack Smith.
Smith had an allegation missing from the first filing: that Trump knew his claims he won the election but it was stolen from him were false. The new filing contains eyewitness allegations that Trump dismissed voting results as “details” that “don’t matter” and the strategy was simply to throw doubt over the results, justified or not. In Trump’s own words, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Trump couldn’t even be bothered with a coherent theory as to how the votes were taken from them. His claims vary wildly from filing to filing, even in appeals of the same case! His estimates amounted to “whatever sounds good,” and the only thing they had in common was an utter lack of evidence to support them. That’s why he lost every single voter fraud filing he made, even though a third of the judges reviewing his filings were Trump appointees. Smith includes first-hand accounts of Trump mocking allegations that voting machines “changed the votes.” I wonder if Fox News will sue Trump if he is found guilty of willfully lying about that; after all, it was repeating those lies that cost Fox News three quarters of a billion dollars in a defamation suit.
Smith hardened the allegations that Trump planned to not only contest, but cast doubt on the election prior to the election. One Trump lawyer’s quote that made it in this time: “What Trump’s going to do is just declare victory. … That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner … that’s our strategy.”
Trump hired Giuliani because Giuliani had stated he would support Trump’s lies. In Smith’s words, Giuliani “was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud” The filing contains one tidbit that Rudy might find interesting: Trump planned to stiff him if the filing failed, and of course it was bound to.
On January 6th, Trump posted to his enraged MAGA monkeys that by failing to invalidate the electoral count, Mike Pence lacked the “courage to do what should have been done.” Learning that Pence had been taken to a safe location so the monkeys wouldn’t lynch him, Trump’s response was “so what?”
Trump’s own people knew he was a lying sack. One staffer’s quote Smith saw fit to include was, “It’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.” Some of Trump’s lawyers have already been sanctioned, and even disbarred for filing his nonsense. More are sure to follow in light of these new revelations. Even the chair of the RNC was warned that Trump’s motions were “fucking nuts.”
More details on the hours Trump spent watching TV and grinning at the chaos he brought to the capitol on January 6th have emerged, and those are included in the filing.
Apparently Jack Smith doesn’t think that watching coverage of a Trump-caused riot is an “official duty.” It’s about on the same ‘official’ level as watching a movie about the French Revolution while munching chips.
It’s pretty safe to assume that Trump’s delay tactics have whipped around and bitten him on the ass.
And this all serves as a warning: Trump plans to pull the same shit again next month.
Smith made it that much harder for Trump to convince Americans with brains of his bullshit.