Special counsel Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment Tuesday in the election interference case against Donald Trump, which prosecutors claim respects the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
While the 36-page indictment doesn’t drop any of the four original charges against Trump, it does remove some of the specific allegations and emphasize how Trump’s actions fell outside of the bounds of “official conduct,” following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. United States, which found that the president could not be tried for most “official conduct.”
In the high court’s majority opinion, Chief Justice John Roberts had specifically mentioned the indictment’s allegation of “several conversations in which Trump pressured the Vice President to reject States’ legitimate electoral votes or send them back to state legislatures for review,” ruling that “whenever the President and Vice President discuss their official responsibilities, they engage in official conduct.”
The decision dealt a heavy blow to Smith’s case, which relied on such conversations to argue that Trump had unlawfully attempted to interfere with the 2020 presidential election.
In a government’s notice, prosecutors wrote that the new indictment “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions in Trump v. United States.”
Evidence for the indictment had been “presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case,” and that jury had separately charged Trump with the same crimes, according to Smith’s team.
In removing some of the evidence from the original indictment, Smith may be attempting to spare himself a lengthy evidentiary hearing, hoping to expedite the process.
Tuesday’s indictment, like the original, alleges that Trump “pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results” following the 2020 presidential election, by engaging in three separate conspiracies: a conspiracy to defraud the government, a conspiracy to obstruct and impede the counting of votes on January 6, and a conspiracy against the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.
The filing comes just before a deadline set by the Justice Department, which would forestall the filing of charges against the former president within 60 days of the upcoming presidential election.
This story has been updated.
