Donald Trump’s lawyers are scrambling to get ahead of what could be this election’s October surprise: the public release of special counsel Jack Smith’s report detailing evidence in the election fraud case against the former president.
In a court filing on Tuesday, Trump’s legal team accused the Department of Justice of putting together a “politically motivated manifesto” specifically timed to influence voters “in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States.”
They asked U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to highly redact the report or stop it from appearing in the court’s public docket altogether.
The report, which runs approximately 180 pages and was filed last Thursday under seal pending the judge’s approval for public release, would reveal grand jury testimony and what Trump lawyers called “sensitive witness statements” gathered by federal investigators over recent years.
Trump’s team says prosecutors must explain “why their proposed public disclosure … will not pose risks to potential witnesses and unfairly prejudice the adjudication of this case.” Ironically, their argument comes after Trump, for months, has been complaining that a judge-imposed gag order has prevented him from attacking former allies for assisting FBI agents and testifying against him.
Trump’s defense attorneys, John F. Lauro and Todd Blanche, turned that narrative upside down, claiming that the DOJ special counsel is hypocritically publicizing investigative materials after vehemently trying to keep them secret in Trump’s classified records case. (Trump-appointed Judge Aileen Cannon dismissed those charges this past summer, and the case is on appeal.)
“Now that public disclosure serves their politically motivated mission, the special counsel’s office takes a different view. The office believes President Trump’s constitutional rights to
impartial jurors and fair proceedings — to say nothing of witness privacy and even safety — all take a back seat to the office’s political goals,” they wrote.
Unstated in today’s filing is that the potentially disastrous timing of this report — and its existence — is only due to the Trump team’s delay tactics in the case. Trump managed to push back the trial by fighting the indictment all the way up to the Supreme Court, which granted him an expansive new definition of presidential immunity. That opinion ultimately sent the trial judge on a fact-finding mission to figure out what alleged misconduct counts as personal versus official actions — hence Smith’s latest report.
Trump’s lawyers initially tried to file their counterargument under seal, but Chutkan ordered the D.C. federal court’s clerk to post it publicly by midday Tuesday.
The judge gave Trump’s team until noon today to file their proposed redactions to the report and until Oct. 10 to go over what they want to keep secret in what’s expected to be a large and detailed appendix to the report. Chutkan could order the report’s release at any time after that.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.