The dust has settled around special counsel Jack Smith's new superseding indictment against Donald Trump — and legal experts have been surprised to discover what's been changed.
Lisa Rubin wrote for MSNBC on Thursday that a key piece of the new indictment is that some of the "most damning evidence" from the previous one has been "removed."
"The charges against Trump — all four of which remain — necessitate showing not only that Trump falsely claimed there was outcome-determinative fraud in the 2020 presidential election and that he had won, but that he knew these claims were false at the time he made them and conspired to change the election outcome," wrote Rubin.
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The indictment originally cited evidence from sources including former Attorney General Bill Barr and White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.
Among the information that was cut was a quote from then-White House lawyer Pat Philbin.
"That document quotes Philbin as having told Trump, '[T]here is no world, there is no option in which you do not leave the White House [o]n January 20th," quoted Rubin. It's the quote she said prosecutors hoped would prove that Trump knew he had lost the election despite continuing to perpetuate the lie that he had won.
The new indictment, which revises the original, is more focused and removes references to Trump attempting to corrupt the Justice Department, while still including charges related to his interactions with Vice President Pence. Prosecutors are trying to comply with a recent Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity while preserving the core of their case against Trump.
As Rubin said, "The superseding indictment is a reflection of a weird, dual reality for Smith and his team: In order to save their case, they also had to jettison some of their best proof."
She thinks that the indictment will survive, in part, because there are still a lot of important Republican Party witnesses willing to testify. Among them are Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr who, according to new indictment, said, "That officials had investigated various claims of election fraud in the state and were not seeing evidence to support them."
