Dazzling-bright sunshine and comfortable air this near-noon Thursday here in California’s Central Valley — welcome to the shift of the seasonal knob.
And speaking of knobs, the T-Rump’s criminal asshole ways should be on display starting today in a DC courtroom.
Special Prosecutor Jack Smith is unloading a supposedly 180-page filing this morning comprised of reactions instead of the SCOTUS immunity bullshit — a shitload of stuff that the public could see before the election.
In granting the okay for the filing, the judge in charge called for no shit — former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance noted: ‘“Trump’s lawyers may have thought this was a good, sneaky strategy for delaying the process, but Judge Chutkan was unimpressed … In her order, she noted that Trump only devoted a sentence to the subject at hand, page limits … Judge Chutkan didn’t bite. She granted the Special Counsel’s request for extra pages and commented on ‘the incoherence of defendant’s demand’ to further delay the trial … Trump, of course, wants the delay because he doesn’t want the public to see the evidence against him during the election … He claimed, in his page limits response, that it was unfair to let Smith detail the evidence against him in the public record ‘at this very sensitive time in our nation’s history.’ Chutkan responded. Smith’s motion will contain the most exhaustive version of the evidence against Trump to date.” ‘
In court:
NEW: Jack Smith has distilled his two-year investigation into a ~180-page brief that will land on Judge Chutkan’s desk today.
If and when we see it (or parts of it) will be in her hands.
w/ @joshgerstein https://t.co/sITnPMc0fh pic.twitter.com/39fYPFflRC
— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) September 26, 2024
Main points from Politico this morning:
Special counsel Jack Smith, stymied at every turn by federal courts from putting Donald Trump on trial, is about to submit his most compelling evidence that the former president conspired to derail the peaceful transfer of power after the 2020 election.
Whether the public sees it before the 2024 election rests with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
On Thursday, Smith’s prosecutors are scheduled to submit to Chutkan a 180-page dossier distilling their case against Trump — the fruits of a two-year investigation that included secret grand jury testimony from former Vice President Mike Pence and former chief of staff Mark Meadows. It is likely the special counsel’s final chance before Election Day to lay out his case for why Trump deserves to be put on trial and convicted.
The filing — a legal brief accompanied by supporting exhibits — is expected to contain never-before-seen evidence about Trump’s efforts to subvert the last election. It could include snippets of interviews prosecutors conducted with some of Trump’s top advisers, documents Smith procured from the National Archives and a log of Trump’s Twitter activity as violence raged on Jan. 6, 2021.
But prosecutors are not going to file these documents publicly. They must first submit them “under seal” to Chutkan, who will then decide how much of the evidence is fit for public release.
Further analysis via Salon yesterday:
Attorney Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House lawyer, told Salon that the filing from Smith was appropriate and necessary in light of the recent Supreme Court ruling but he said that the filing likely won’t be like special counsel reports.
“The Mueller report [was] 400 pages of we ‘didn’t find anything,’ this will be 180 pages of evidence and the evidence will be powerful, undeniable and persuasive,” Cobb said. “The issue for the judge to decide is whether it infringes on official acts assigned to the presidency and whether it could chill any decision-making by the president if the areas involved cross that constitutional line.”
As for the potential that swaths of the filing may be redacted — something suggested by the fact that there will be a private and public version of the document — Cobb said that he thinks “the bulk of the evidence will be out there for public viewing.” He added much of the evidence, like Trump’s call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, is already public.
James Sample, a constitutional law professor at Hofstra University, agreed that the filing was necessary in light of “the Supreme Court’s dramatic expansion of Presidential immunity,” saying that “an oversized, highly detailed legal brief, detailing with as much factual specificity as is possible, is not only appropriate, but necessary.”
“It is precisely because Mr. Trump, along with his nakedly partisan Supreme Court allies, has so stunningly succeeded in thwarting the truth-finding mechanism of an adversarial trial, that Jack Smith’s filing is essential both for the task of categorizing official and non-official acts, but also for the filing’s value in adding to the historical narrative of one of the gravest attacks on democracy in American history,” Sample said.
Sample went on to quote former Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, who once said that “sunlight is the best disinfectant” in reference to the details expected in the filing and the potential for redaction.
“If the special prosecutor’s filing sheds light on the complex, violent, deadly and very-nearly successful effort to overturn the 2020 election, then, even apart from the filing’s legal necessity, the filing is a service to the nation,” Sample said.
[…]
Sarah Krissoff, a former federal prosecutor, predicted that the matter of redactions could be an area where the prosecution and defense might clash, noting that the Supreme Court’s ruling demands that the court engages in a “fact-dependent” inquiry to determine if something was an official act and that “Trump’s team very much does not want all those facts aired (and analyzed) in public.”
“The defense team wants the redactions to be as broad as possible, to protect against the dissemination of information that is damaging to the former President,” Krissoff said. “It is very likely that the judge has to weigh in on the scope of the redactions, given the competing interests of the government, the defense, and the press.”
Another form of explanation per CBS News, also this morning:
Anxiety plus as we wait and see.
Despite the obvious, or not, T-Rump is a piece of shit, yet here we are once again…
(Creepy, vile, and dangerous image out front found here.)