With his lawfare efforts collapsing, Special Counsel Jack Smith seized on what Politico described as his “last chance before Election Day” to submit a 165-page filing smearing former President Donald Trump. Unsealed Wednesday, the filing serves no real purpose except to create fodder for Democrats ahead of the election.
Judge Tanya Chutkan made Smith’s 165-page filing public on Wednesday, just days after she granted Smith’s request to file the “oversized” brief. Filings, per ABC News, “are normally limited to 45 pages.”
The crux of Smith’s filing is that Trump used “false claims of election fraud to disrupt the electoral process.”
CNN senior legal analyst Elie Honig said, “There are a couple of unusual things about the way this happened.”
“So first of all, ordinarily when it comes time for motions, the defense goes first,” Honig said. “Here, Jack Smith said a few weeks ago, ‘Judge Chutkan, we want to go first.’ And Judge Chutkan actually said, ‘Well, that’s quite unusual,’ but she let them go first. And the effect of that now is we essentially have Jack Smith’s case at least on paper, at least the parts that have not been redacted, 30-something days before the election, whereas we might not otherwise have had it.”
Trump’s lawyers had argued that the government “aims to proffer their untested and biased views to the Court and the public as if they are conclusive” and that “it’s incredibly unfair [for Smith to file his oversized brief] in the sense that they’re able to put [it] in the public record at this very sensitive time in our nation’s history.”
Trump’s lawyers also argued, according to Chutkan’s ruling, that “the brief would run afoul of the Justice Manual, which prohibits federal prosecutors from ‘select[ing] the timing of any action, including investigative steps, criminal charges, or statements, for the purpose of affecting any election.”
Chutkan said that the “court need not address the substance of those claims.”