A 10-page joint filing that Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith submitted late Friday night with former President Donald Trump's legal team in his Washington, D.C. election interference case was mostly unremarkable, aside from one specific line.
Politico reported that Smith maintains he is ready to move forward with the case "promptly at any time the Court deems appropriate," and emphasized to Judge Tanya Chutkan that it was up to her how to proceed. But as former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner observed during a Saturday segment on MSNBC, the initially dry joint status report becomes much more interesting given Smith's suggestion that previously unknown evidence against Trump may soon come to light.
"There is one what I would call money line, and it's on page two," Kirschner said, before pulling out a hard copy of the brief and reading from it directly.
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"Here is what I would call the money line: [Smith] says that the government, the prosecutors propose that it will file a brief in which we will explain why immunity does not apply to the categories of allegations in the superseding, the new indictment ... 'or additional unplanned categories of evidence that the government intends to introduce in trial and will put in this brief,'" Kirschner said as he read the document on-air.
"What does that mean?" Kirschner continued. "Jack smith just said, 'Judge Chutkan, I'm going to put lots of other information and evidence about Donald Trump's crimes and conduct so you have it all. So you can make a decision about whether each thing Donald Trump did was official or unofficial, might enjoy immunity, or should not enjoy immunity.'"
As Kirschner noted, the Trump v. United States decision the Supreme Court issued in July granted presidents absolute broad criminal immunity for all "official acts." This handed Trump a big victory in his ongoing effort to throw out the indictment Jack Smith handed down in response to the ex-president's actions on January 6, 2021 and in the lead-up to it. But the Court left it up to lower court judges (like Chutkan) to determine what constitutes an "official act" and what does not.
Prior to the Friday filing, Smith unveiled a superseding indictment in the D.C. election interference case, which is the first major development in the case since the immunity ruling threw a wrench into the gears of the two federal criminal cases against the 45th president of the United States. That indictment was stripped of all language referring to Trump as a former president, and emphasized that the January 6 rally Trump held in D.C. prior to the storming of the U.S. Capitol was paid for by Trump's campaign, making the case that he was not acting in his official capacities as president at the time.
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During his interview, Kirschner noted that after Smith's hint of new evidence, Trump's lawyers spent more than seven pages putting in "a bunch of nonsense" that was "designed to delay the case." He theorized that this is because "they don't want any of that new evidence and information coming out before the election or at any other time, if they can help it."
"What remains to be seen is when will Judge Chutkan say 'okay, we're going to litigate this issue. I want the briefs.' Will they be September, will they be October?" Kirschner said. "Because those briefs, according to what Jack Smith said, are likely to contain a whole bunch of information that the grand jury knows about Donald Trump's crimes, but that the American people do not yet know about."
Watch the video of Kirschner's comments below, or by clicking this link.
