What Jack Smith Removed from Trump’s Superseding Indictment
When the Supreme Court issued its obstruction and presidential immunity rulings, it required Special Counsel Jack Smith to go back to the drawing board to re-present the charges against Trump in the election interference case.
The superseding indictment was slightly scaled down, but the indictment's guts remained intact, even if they had been reworded a bit to fit the rulings.
We are going to take a quick look at what Smith removed and changed in the document.
Changes…
One thing you will not see in the new indictment is the mention of “discussions with Justice Department officials,” which the Supreme Court ruled to be out of bounds.
Some of the changes were semantic in nature, such as not referring to Trump as the 45th President, and calling him a “candidate for president.”
I have discussed this angle multiple times: The court needs to separate what actions Trump took were considered to fall under official acts and what were those of a private citizen and candidate.
Smith’s office is clearly giving the court a nudge to show that these particular allegations were that of a candidate, not a president.
The new indictment also says Trump used his campaign to “repeat and widely disseminate” false electoral claims, again clearly showing that these were the actions of a campaign and not that of a president’s office.
Smith also included a new line stating, “These false claims were unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing, and the Defendant and co-conspirators repeated them even after they were publicly disproven.”
One line that was added that I found particularly interesting, which really tries to establish that this was a private affair and not that of a sitting president, states, “The Defendant continued his lies through the day of the certification proceeding on January 6.
“That morning, the Defendant gave a Campaign speech at a privately-funded, privately-organized political rally held on the Ellipse in Washington, D.C. During the speech, the Defendant used many of the same unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and publicly disproven lies to exhort the gathered crowd to march to the Capitol.”
When this case goes before the court again, it will be up to Judge Chutkan to designate the actions of a president and those of a private citizen or candidate, but Smith has clearly set the table for her in what he believes should be considered actionable acts by Donald Trump, the presidential candidate.
These are all actions that will not be protected under presidential immunity.
