Jack Smith is about to drop a 180-page brief on Judge Tanya Chutkan in the J6 case, it says here.
“In a new filing, the Special Counsel tells Judge Tanya Chutkan its opening immunity brief will be roughly 180 pages with roughly half devoted to a ‘detailed factual proffer’ and plenty of sensitive material warranting redactions,” the attorney added. “The defense opposes the Special Counsel’s request to file such an oversized brief and has asked to have until Tuesday at 5 pm to submit a written opposition.”
Kyle Cheney, senior legal affairs reporter for Politico, also reported on the upcoming brief, saying, “Jack Smith signals his brief on presidential immunity, due Thursday, will come in at 180 pages.”
Legal analyst Allison Gill, better known as Mueller, She Wrote, added that “Jack Smith asks for permission to exceed the page limit for his immunity brief. It will be 180 pages, and as expected, they intend to file a substantial part of it UNDER SEAL.”
Former prosecutor Barb McQuade said, “Not a surprise that Jack Smith’s brief in immunity case is lengthy. He plans to lay out the mountain of evidence against Trump.”
I expect, on top of everything else this week, Trump’s lawyers are going to claim an emergency to try to ban Jack Smith’s book report, currently due Thursday.
As you’ll recall, after Judge Tanya Chutkan finally got the Trump January 6 case back, she agreed with Jack Smith’s proposed path forward: They would submit a brief explaining how the superseding indictment complies with the Supreme Court’s immunity opinion. Chutkan set a deadline of September 26, Thursday, for that brief.
Trump seems certain that if voters see that brief, he will lose the election.
Last Thursday, Trump’s lawyers submitted what was supposed to be a discovery filing, in which they basically said, “NOOOOOOO!!!!! No briefing before the election.” …
…Trump will oppose not just the excess pages, 180 instead of 45, but the entire filing. Now he’s got one less day to make that argument.
Which is what you need to understand the other things in the Jack Smith request. Trump is going to stage an emergency to get this question elevated to SCOTUS to prevent the filing this week. He will try to take things SCOTUS ordered Chutkan to do out of her hands, to put them back before SCOTUS.
Anticipating that, Smith starts his request by laying out that he is just trying to do what Chutkan ordered, to show that SCOTUS ordered precisely this briefing.
Of course, the current SCOTUS doesn’t seem to mind looking corrupt and inconsistent, as long as it helps Trump.
I’m sure you’ll be distressed to know that a lot of things are not working out for Trump these days. For example, the Guardian reports that in August the Harris campaign and DNC raised $257 million in campaign contributions, while Trump and the RNC took in only $85 million. And I believe that’s way down from previous months.
Trump responded by announcing he is selling commemorative silver coins, although it’s not clear profit from the coins will go into his campaign. The coins are $100 each, which is quite a markup for silver.
In another sign of increasing desperation, Trump is now declaring that once he’s re-elected, women will no longer think about abortion. His arguments for why that would be true are not terribly clear, however. Perhaps he intends to make thinking about aboriton illegal. That must be the case, especially since there is new documentation of women getting killed because of the Trump abortion bans.
From 2019 to 2022, the rate of maternal mortality cases in Texas rose by 56%, compared with just 11% nationwide during the same time period, according to an analysis by the Gender Equity Policy Institute. The nonprofit research group scoured publicly available reports from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and shared the analysis exclusively with NBC News.
This was expected. There is data going back years from many countries showing that criminalizing abortion tends to correlate to higher maternal mortality rates. Maybe Republicans should have thought about that.
Trump also endeared himself to women by calling MSNBC’s Stephanie Ruhle a “dumb as a rock bimbo” for arguing in favor of Harris on Bill Maher’s show. Ruhel’s opinion so disturbed Trump he issued a long tirade on Truth Social in which he insulted Ruhle, Maher, Bret Stephens (also on the show), “MSDNC,” and the New York Times. I think we can say that Trump is not exactly a roll-with-the punches guy. That man’s head is going to explode any day now.
You’ve probably heard that Kamala Harris accepted an invitation from CNN for an October debate. Trump has declared it’s “too late” to debate. He may change his mind if his numbers continue to slide. Both candidates are also talking to “Sixty Minutes” about interviews.