Despite much protesting by Donald Trump’s lawyers, a trove of evidence gathered by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith was released Friday. Its contents shed more light on the former president’s political calculations around his legal troubles than on the actual case.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan ordered the publication of four massive volumes of transcripts, emails and other investigative materials gathered by federal prosecutors over the past two years. The vast majority of the 1,889 pages released Friday were marked “SEALED” and left blank, including some of what could have been the most damning evidence to date.
What was visible consisted mostly of the transcripts of interviews conducted by congressional investigators with the House Jan. 6 Committee, which were already made public nearly two years ago.
Still, Trump’s lawyers’ explicitly called for the documents to be withheld from the public until after Election Day.
“I would imagine if one were a Trump attorney, you’d fight this coming out because it refreshes the public’s memory of events around Jan. 6, which is not particularly positive for their candidate,” said law professor Ciara Torres-Spelliscy, who was reading the court filing Friday.
“You and I may have memorized the Jan. 6 Committee report, but I don’t think the general public has ever even cracked it open,” she said.
The records are meant to bolster the special counsel’s argument that Trump acted in a personal capacity rather than that of the nation’s president when he lied about supposed voting fraud and sought to overturn election results. It’s part of Smith’s effort to restructure the criminal case against Trump months after the conservative-leaning Supreme Court granted him a new and broad definition of immunity.
Though the file has technically been made public, prosecutors liberally redacted their own findings.
What would have included what investigators heard about former Vice President Mike Pence’s personal interactions with Trump in the weeks after they lost to Joe Biden and Kamala Harris is instead an empty page marked “GA 1037.”
In a previous court filing, prosecutors had cited the page when detailing how Pence had tried to convince Trump to give up his efforts to cling to power, pointing to “a private lunch on November 12 in which Pence reiterated a face-saving option for the defendant: ‘don’t concede but recognize process is over.’”
Two other pages left blank would have explained how prosecutors discovered that Trump kept telling the nation the 2020 election was “rigged” and continued to sue to overturn results in several states despite hearing from his own lawyer that the lawsuits were failing. Last week, prosecutors had cited two pages marked GA 430 and GA 736 when describing “a November 23 phone call in which the defendant told Pence that the defendant’s private attorney … was not optimistic about the election challenges.”
Instead, most of the material on Pence that was left unredacted in the report pointed to excerpts from his memoir, “So Help Me God.”
Prosecutors even went as far as to redact the names of Trump allies who are openly mentioned in government documents that are already public. When pointing to House Jan. 6 Committee transcripts of interviews with Trump political senior adviser Jason Miller, prosecutors blacked out his name — even though congressional documents are already available.
Similarly, prosecutors also redacted the name of former Trump White House official Peter Navarro when pointing to a Dec. 7, 2020, report that’s already public and plainly states that “Dr. Navarro violated the Hatch Act on several occasions when he engaged in political activity in his official capacity.”
Trump’s lawyers Todd Blanche and John F. Lauro had asked the judge last week to hold back from publishing Smith’s four appendices until a week after the election, indicating the importance of holding this back until after voters had already gone to the polls. Trump’s lawyers even asked Chutkan to give them extra time if she disagreed so they could “evaluate litigation options” in what could turn into yet another appeal that interrupts the case and sends it back to the Supreme Court.
And that’s why Torres-Spelliscy told NOTUS that Smith’s extensive redactions might make sense.
“Smith is trying to protect the integrity of a future trial, and that is a good value to uphold,” she said. “I’m sure it’s frustrating for members of the public who’d like to have more detail on what might come up at trial, but it actually makes some prosecutorial sense to try to protect witnesses to maintain their security to prevent any attempt at witness tampering.”
“We already saw what Trump did during his Manhattan trial, where he was literally name-checking witnesses in public statements. Perhaps they want to try to prevent that type of behavior,” Torres-Spelliscy continued.
The question now is whether that trial will even happen. Trump has already indicated that he would kill off Smith’s investigation if he’s elected president once again next month.
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Jose Pagliery is a reporter at NOTUS.