The First October Surprise

Yesterday afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkin released the partially redacted 165 page brief from Jack Smith called “Government’s Motion for Immunity Decisions”. You can read it here. Here are the opening sentences:

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. 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.

My guess is that most of you are reading this post for the high points, since it’s only us extreme political junkies (and thankfully a bunch of lawyers) who will parse it paragraph by paragraph. And yes, there’s crowd-sourcing underway to identify all of the redacted names.

WOW!!

The thing to understand is that the Convicted Felon brought this on himself by taking his case to the Supremes. Their decision throwing the case back to Judge Chutkin was one of the worst things that could have happened to him. Don’t get me wrong, SCOTUS morally and legally should have refused the case, but we all knew that wasn’t going to happen a year ago when Smith asked for a determination months before the side of evil requested one. What the Supremes did in their convoluted judgement was to say that everything that was potentially NOT a government function needed to be evaluated for whether it met the mushy and idiotic standard they set. Remeber that John Robert’s decision specifically precluded an evaluation of any FACTS.

Those “facts” are what we know as “evidence.” And this brief is full of evidence. SPECIFIC evidence regarding what the Convicted Felon and his co-conspirators did to try and steal the 2020 election. Each piece of evidence is offered in the brief as proof that his actions, and those of his co-conspirators, were AS A CANDIDATE and not as an elected government official. These facts show conclusively that acts are unofficial acts that can be prosecuted. (That last sentence is one blonde girl’s personal opinion.)

The beauty of it is that while we knew a lot of the framework of what happened, there are now details from grand jury testimony, FBI files and other sources that were unavailable to the January 6th committee. And each point will need to be adjudicated in Judge Chutkin’s court. That means witnesses and their testimony.

What is going to happen is that the document will be dissected over the next several days, and will be prominent on news shows and print outlets, detailing how the Convicted Felon KNEW a couple days after the election in 2020 that he had lost. His lawyers will file a brief with their response to why these things were official acts, and then there will be evidenciary hearings. Those hearings will consider whether each act is immune or not immune under the SCOTUS decision. It will then go back up to the Appellate Court, and then to the Supremes, who will either refuse to hear it, or be forced to evaluate those pesky facts they avoided last round.

In the initial filing of the case, Jack Smith did not include co-conspirators in the indictment. That, as I understand it, was to keep the case streamlined and make the path to trial simplest and quickest. That time constraint is removed now, so it’s possible we’ll see additional indictments. And as we know from previous cases, that means guilty pleas.

One of the interesting things in the filing is that people around the Convicted Felon KNEW he’d lost and chose to either appease him, or, as in the case of Mike Pence, tried to be “nice to him” to endeavor to get him to admit publicly that he’d lost. FAT CHANCE. Others did tell him the truth, but they were for the most part ignored.

If you read the brief, or any of the summaries (on all news sources except Fox and other MAGA outlets) you’ll see the callousness and indifference of the Convicted Felon, and his unwillingness to accept failure.

We know, for example, that when calls were made to various election officials around the country, they asked for proof, and none was forthcoming. Remember that lawyers Eastman, Guiliani, Chesebro, Ellis, and others have already either been disbarred or had their licenses temporarily rescinded for their attempts to pressure election officials and for participating in the coup attempt.

We know that the speech he gave on the Ellipse the morning of January 6th was a campaign rally and not a presidential speech. One of the details of that is when a president makes a speech, the song played when he enters and exits is “Hail to the Chief” as opposed to what was played at the rally: Y.M.C.A. by the Village People. Not to mention that the rally was privately funded. It’s the little details that make the brief so juicy.

We know that on January 6th, the Convicted Felon was alone in the dining room, watching Fox, knowing what was happening at the Capitol minute by minute, and sending tweets (and only he could have sent them) egging on the rioters.

We knew from the January 6th committee findings that many people had been asking him to quell the violence at the Capitol, and instead he tweeted that Pence had let them all down. From the brief:

The content of the 2:24 p.m. tweet was not a message sent to address a matter of public concern and ease unrest; it was the message of an angry candidate upon the realization that he would lose power.

Finally, when told that Pence was in real danger, obviously from his tweets and inaction in getting help to the Capitol, he said “So what?”.

I’ll bring you more information when the co-conspirators are identified, and after I’ve finished reading the whole brief (I’m only about 40 pages in).

For now, take joy in the fact that this came out when it did. The timing would have been better had the trial commenced and concluded in the spring, but Roberts and HIS co-conspirators were never going to let that happen. But this is great timing for those Republican voters who will now be reminded of January 6th, and what the Felon did.