You're watching The Legal Breakdown. Glenn, we have bombshell news here, the news that we've been waiting for. Judge Chutkan in Washington, D.C., has unsealed this 165 page motion, this filing that was submitted by Jack Smith.
This will form the basis of this mini trial that will ultimately be litigated to determine what falls under the umbrella of official conduct that Donald Trump could be prosecuted for. So there is a lot in this filing. I'm going to read certain portions here. And Glenn, if you can. expound on them and explain what the legal implications of everything I read are.
I think that would be the most helpful way to do this. And a lot of what I'm about to read are beyond damning here. So I think we can start off with this.
Donald Trump had told certain advisors, and the advisors'names are redacted, but he had told his advisors before the 2020 election that he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted. What does that do to Donald Trump, legally speaking? Brian, the conspiracy was formed long before...
the results were in, long before all of the votes were counted. I have to tell you, I am plowing my way through this 165-page motion, but our viewers shouldn't think of it as a legal filing. This is the opening statement.
This is a 165-page opening statement, and it reads like a darn crime thriller, even though we know whodunit. Donald Trump done it. But now, you know, everybody will have...
the opportunity to see for themselves what Donald Trump did it, how he did it, with whom he did it, and the fact that they had this criminal plan, this corrupt scheme in place to say, listen, we don't care about the expressed will of the American voters. We're just going to declare victory. And then everything we say and do will be sort of to push that false narrative. And I'll tell you... This is probably a 10 on the legal Richter scale, this 165-page opening statement.
On a scale of 1 to 10, Brian, it's a 10 on the legal Richter scale. But I have to tell you, on the political Richter scale, this thing is like a 1,006. I mean, I just hope everybody sits back, takes the time to read it, and I know we're going to go through as much of it as we can as quickly and concisely as we can, but it's no substitute.
for people to then go back, take the time and read it and see what Donald Trump did in these democracy busting crimes. OK, Glenn, the next one here that I want to touch on is that a Trump campaign employee and an alleged co-conspirator sought to foment violence at the TCF ballot processing center. That is the one in in Detroit.
And I'm going to read a quote here. Quote, we think a batch of votes heavily in Biden's favor is right. Find a reason it isn't. Give me options to file litigation, even if it is.
Then the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest, reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot. And this other co-conspirator responded, make them riot, do it. So again, looking to foment violence here. Yeah, looking to foment violence to disrupt and mislead and try to steal a presidential election.
This is another example of it. You know, this is one of what we would call an the overt acts. What's an overt act? Well, the criminal conspiracy was formed, and I want to talk in a few minutes about just how big this criminal conspiracy might be based on this 165 page opening statement. You know, the criminal conspiracy was formed, right?
We're just going to declare victory notwithstanding the actual vote count, and then everything we see as we move through this court filing, these things are overt acts. An overt act is basically a step that one or more of the co-conspirators takes toward the commission of the crime. And this fomenting violence at the Detroit vote counting center to try to disrupt the counting of the votes is one of those overt acts. And each and every one will further bolster Donald Trump's criminal responsibility.
And I know we're going to move through several of them, but this is relating some of what the co-conspirators said and did. But here is why that's so important. important.
People should keep in mind that once a conspiracy is formed, Brian, everything that every co-conspirator says and does is legally attributable to every other co-conspirator. In other words, once you join a criminal conspiracy, as Donald Trump did, you now suffer the consequences of every crime and every incriminating statement made by every member of the conspiracy. And that is why When we go through what these co-conspirators that weren't Donald Trump, what others did and said in furtherance of the conspiracy, think about it. It's all evidence of Donald Trump's crime that can and will be introduced him at his ultimate trial. Another point that Jack Smith brought up is that Mike Pence had told Donald Trump that he'd seen no evidence of outcome-determinative fraud in the election.
Jack Smith wrote, This was one of many conversations the defendant, meaning Donald Trump and Pence, had as running mates in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. Pence gradually and gently tried to convince the defendant to accept the lawful results of the election. Even if it meant they lost.
So what are the implications of this, of Donald Trump spreading the big lie, knowing full well that A, he had lost, and we know numerous instances where he was told that he was lost, and B, knowing in retrospect that he would go on to then try to pressure Mike Pence on January 6th into doing something that Mike Pence had already revealed he had no interest in doing. Brian, this is evidentiary gold against Donald Trump. Why do I say that? Because any time you have a witness... who can testify to a jury.
Wait a minute. I told Donald Trump myself and he heard it and he acknowledged that he heard it, that there was no fraud undermining the election's results. Mr. President, you lost when you can get that one-on-one conversation before a jury, not hearsay, not third hand, not a news account, not what somebody wrote in a book, but a one-on-one conversation from an eyewitness who can.
directly tell the jury, I told Donald Trump he lost. He essentially said, I don't care. We're going to keep on keeping on with our criminal scheme, by which I'm going to try to steal the presidency. I'm telling you, talk about a nail in Donald Trump's legal coffin. You know, Mike Pence will be a marquee witness at Donald Trump's trial.
And the reason this information about Pence becomes more and more important is because the Supreme Court said, well, you know, presidents get to talk. to their vice president. So maybe he should have some immunity unless they're talking about crime and corruption and Donald Trump is acting as a candidate trying to steal an election, not as a president of the United States trying to enforce the laws of our nation. And that is another reason Jack Smith is including this information about a conversation between Pence and Trump by which Trump knew he lost the election and that provides evidence of Donald Trump's what? His criminal.
intent, his corrupt state of mind. Huge piece of evidence. We also have evidence in the filing that Jack Smith will introduce instances in which Donald Trump and his co-conspirators basically made up all of their claims about non-citizens, about illegal aliens voting in the election out of whole cloth. For example, the conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 non-citizens voted in Arizona.
Five days later, it was a few hundred thousand. Three weeks later... the bare minimum was 40 or 50,000.
The reality is 250,000. Days later, it was 32,000. Then it went back to 36,000. So again, just picking numbers out of whole cloth. What are the implications of this claim?
So Brian, the fact that they have evidence that they will introduce about knowingly false claims of voter fraud by immigrants or by anybody, dead folk voting, all of that nonsense, it all helps establish that this was a multi-pronged, multi-front effort to try to steal this election by hook or by crook. And they were deploying all of these different vehicles to do that, whether it's pressuring Mike Pence not to certify the results of the election, whether it is insisting that secretaries of state just magically find 11,780 votes enough to corruptly declare Trump the winner, or by saying there's a whole lot of immigrants and dead folk. voting. It is a multi-pronged, multi-faceted attack on the election. And here's the other thing.
You know, Jack Smith has to prove that these things were not official acts of the president. So the more information and evidence that we see like this, like Donald Trump and his criminal associates conspiring to falsely, knowingly, intentionally, falsely claim folk are voting who don't have a right to vote, that helps take it out. Of the presidential immunity realm, because it is never an official duty of a president of the United States to get together with his criminal associates to lie to the American people about voter fraud that everybody knew didn't exist. Again, evidentiary gold. Further proving that point, we have another piece in the filing where Mark Meadows and an unnamed White House lawyer exchanged text messages on December 3rd, 2020. confirming that a statistic that had been repeated regarding dead voters was just outright false.
So just more evidence. on that exact point. Glenn, we also have another piece in the filing that outlines how a U.S. senator, also unnamed right now, helped facilitate a December 8th call between Trump and the Georgia attorney general.
So what does it mean wherein we have sitting Republican senators who are facilitating calls between Donald Trump and these state officials where the purpose of them, again, not unlike what we saw between Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, was to attempt to subvert the election or for Donald Trump to wage his pressure campaign. Brian, a la the movie Jaws, we're going to need a bigger boat. It means we're going to need a bigger indictment. And we are probably going to see a bigger indictment. I'm so glad you brought that reference to a U.S. senator who may be criminally complicit, not completely clear.
Only Jack Smith knows for sure. But maybe being criminally complicit in Donald Trump's conspiracy. And here is what I was really taken by when I was...
Just making my way through this 165-page opening statement, I have not read it all, but I did jump to the end to see how many people, how many potential co-defendants there are in this indictment. Now, everybody will soon realize if they look at this 165-page opening statement that Jack Smith blacked out almost all of the names, and he entered numbers and other designations for all of these people. They are either CC1, CC2, CC3. What is that? Co-conspirator.
And we already knew, courtesy of the earlier Trump indictment, there are at least six co-conspirators. But then beyond that, because he hasn't yet named or indicated there are other co-conspirators, he started to give them the designation P1. What is P1? Private or political operative. of Donald Trump.
And when you start looking through all of the P1s, P2s, P3s, you can tell by what Jack Smith relates about the conduct of these private political operatives that a lot of them are going to have criminal liability and are probably going to end up as indicted co-conspirators someday. This thing is long from over. We're gonna see other federal indictments drop, I promise you. I'm with other indicted co-conspirators over and above the six unindicted co-conspirators that Jack Smith included earlier in an indictment.
And I jumped to the end, Brian. Why? Because I wanted to see how many private political operatives there were. Well, I hope everybody's sitting down. Seventy seven.
Does that mean that we can actually seven? I'm sorry. Does that mean we can actually see? I mean, if this turns into some RICO prosecution, I know right now Jack Smith built this case for speed. But we've spoken about in the past when you have these unindicted co-conspirators, that means it's pretty much just a matter of time until they're actually indicted as well.
So does that mean that we can see a RICO prosecution with 77 co-defendants? Not necessarily. And here's why I say that. I think Watergate corralled about 48 people who were ultimately charged.
This makes, you know, Watergate look like basically shoplifting. OK. Yeah.
And. And just because there are 77 political operatives included in this opening statement, it does not mean that all 77 necessarily have criminal exposure, or even if they do have some minimal criminal exposure, Jack Smith may just want to use some of these people as straight-up witnesses rather than charging them, flipping them, and converting them into cooperating witnesses, somebody who pleads guilty and agrees to testify truthfully at the trials of others. But when I saw that P-77 and I looked at what some of these characters were alleged to have done, we're going to have lots and lots and lots more co-defendants added in the future. Not necessarily all of them, but, you know, Jack Smith is far from done issuing federal indictments in this case.
On the issue of RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel, he had, Donald Trump had asked her to participate in a meeting where he was going to speak with... Michigan's Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House. This was obviously, again, in an effort to get them to bend his will with his fake elector scheme. She said that she couldn't be involved in the meeting with those legislators because it could be perceived as lobbying.
So she said no, she rejected it. Donald Trump dialed her in anyway. What are the implications of this? You know, the implications are that Ronna McDaniel, assuming she has been cooperating with Jack Smith and based on...
The fact that this information is now being disclosed about conversations that it looks like she had with Trump and others, she probably is cooperating. She may never land herself as an indicted co-conspirator in future federal indictments. But what's interesting about it is when Ronna McDaniel apparently refused to do at least some of Donald Trump's dirty bidding, you know, his criminal dirty work, what do we know happened to Ronna McDaniel?
She was dethroned, dethroned by Donald Trump. So what did he do? Not only did he try to enlist people.
In his conspiracy, in his corrupt scheme to steal the presidency, but if they were unwilling, it looks like he retaliated against him. That is, again, adding important evidence on top of important evidence. In other words, join my criminal conspiracy or there will be hell to pay.
All of this is so compelling. It is sharply incriminating evidence against Donald Trump. In fact, just to build on what you just said, Ronald McDaniel.
was asked to promote a report promoting some bogus claims about Dominion voting machines and that they were manipulating Michigan's tabulations in a Democratic-leaning county. And yet she refused to because she had been told that the report was, quote, fucking nuts. Those were her words in this filing. And so this is the kind of stuff that Donald Trump was pushing his co-conspirators to promote, something that they themselves were admitting was fucking nuts. And think about that.
If you are telling people, join my conspiracy, I don't care about the quality of the narrative. I am pushing and ordering you to tell whether it's effing nuts or not. We need to take advantage of it.
And then when they won't do it, he retaliates against them. Brian, you put 12 people in a wooden box in that courtroom in Washington, D.C. You start presenting this. evidence, Donald Trump will be convicted so fast it will make his head spin.
There was another part that I thought was especially striking here. We all know about the Texas lawsuit that sought to invalidate the election results in four other states. And this was being promoted by the party that beats its chest about states'rights. But we'll just put that aside for a moment.
Donald Trump told the Georgia Attorney General Chris Carr, quote, I hope you're not talking to your AGs and encouraging them not to get on the lawsuit. meaning he was lobbying Chris Carr, the Georgia attorney general, to talk to his other colleagues in other states and making sure, hey, I hope you're not telling all of those people, all of your other attorney general colleagues across the country, not to get on this lawsuit. In other words, he wants Donald Trump to get as many attorneys general on this lawsuit as possible because that Texas lawsuit sought to invalidate the election results in four other states because Donald Trump wasn't happy with the results there. What are the implications of Trump telling Georgia attorney general Carr that? Brian, this helps prove that Donald Trump was not acting in his official capacity as a president.
He was lobbying to try to undermine the results of an election he lost. So this kind of evidence will go a long way to help convincing Judge Chutkan, and hopefully someday the Supreme Court, I'm sure we'll talk about that, to rule that this was not the official conduct of a president of the United States. Therefore, he can be prosecuted for it. He does not have presidential immunity.
This piece of evidence fits right into that argument. And let's finish off with this, because I think at this point, I don't want to bring sand to the beach here. And I understand that that a lot of this stuff is especially damning.
And I do want to get to the implications for the Supreme Court. But I want to bring one more piece of evidence to your attention. So one piece of evidence says that Trump, quote, suggested he would fight to remain in power regardless of whether he had won the election. The quote is this specifically following the 2020 election while aboard Marine One, the defendant, meaning Donald Trump, told his wife, daughter and political operative 14 and son in law, political operative 13, quote, It doesn't matter if you won or lost the election.
You still have to fight like hell. So what does this do? This feels like a tacit admission that Donald Trump not only lost, but is willing to subvert the process regardless, even knowing that he lost because because, you know, because you just have to fight.
Because it's just baked into the cake that you have to fight. It proves three things, Brian. Criminal intent, criminal intent, and criminal intent. A guilty state of mind, corrupt mens rea.
All of those phrases basically connote the same thing. Donald Trump knew he was committing crimes. There is no way you can read this 165-page opening statement and conclude maybe Donald Trump really thought he won. Absolutely not.
You know, and this is a variation on the theme that we've heard before. From some of Donald Trump's own DOJ officials, a guy named Richard Donahue, for example, once Donald Trump was told there's no systemic fraud undermining the election's results, what did he say? I don't care. Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and my Republican allies in Congress.
The open question at this point is how many of those Republican allies in Congress or political allies, operatives one through 77 are going to be indicted as part of Donald Trump's conspiracy. OK, so we read a handful of just a tiny fraction of of the avalanche of devastating information included in this motion. I want to talk about where we go from here. So I know that now this is going to be. litigated in D.C.
This will have this mini trial. This is going to be especially devastating for Donald Trump because we are four weeks out from the election right now. And by virtue of us having this mini trial, it's basically bringing back to the surface all the crimes that Donald Trump committed on before and in the immediate aftermath of the election certification and January 6th. So eventually it's going to get in front of the Supreme Court. How does the Supreme Court look at this and determine that on any planet In any universe, any of this stuff falls under the umbrella of an official act by the President of the United States and is therefore protected by presidential immunity.
Brian, if the Supreme Court has any lingering loyalty to the facts, to the law, and to the Constitution, they must declare none of this that we're reading in this 165-page opening statement constitutes official presidential. Acts. None of it.
None of it should enjoy immunity from prosecution. And I'll tell you, if the Supreme Court says, you know what, we just don't care, we're abandoning the facts, the law, and the Constitution, and we are going to try to install Donald Trump into the White House for another term, I don't know what will happen, and I'm not going to predict what will happen, but whatever lingering... legitimacy the Supreme Court might have at this moment will be gone.
And I don't know where that leaves us as a nation if the Supreme Court in essence joins Donald Trump's conspiracy to try to reinstall him into the power of the presidency. You know I hate to predict anything the Supreme Court will or won't do but I hope for the good of our country. They go with the facts, the law, and the Constitution, and they declare that Donald Trump can, should, and must be prosecuted for his crimes.
Okay, well, before we even get to the Supreme Court portion of this, this entire motion will be litigated in the courtroom in Washington, D.C. Glenn, when can we expect this process to begin? Will it be televised? What can we expect here as far as the public is concerned? I doubt it will be televised.
That would have to be an exception to the rule that federal courts do not allow cameras in the courtroom. I don't expect them to change course, though they clearly should for the good of the nation. When? That's an open question, but what we do know, there's another deadline coming up, October 10th, because this was the opening statement. Now, Jack Smith has also filed the appendix to this motion.
which contains all of the evidence, grand jury transcripts, FBI write-ups, etc. And Donald Trump has another opportunity to object to what Jack Smith redacted out of the appendix. And I suspect we will get a ruling just as promptly, maybe by October 11th, saying, yeah, you didn't make any valid arguments, Donald Trump and your lawyers, so I'm going to go ahead and make public the appendix, all of the supporting evidence. And then... Judge Chutkan will set a next hearing date.
Now, there are two ways this hearing can go. You can do a hearing by proffer. What does that mean? It means no witnesses are called. It means that we've got the opening statement.
We've got the facts in the 165-page motion. Donald Trump's lawyers will say, we accept those facts for purposes of litigating this motion. We don't concede they're true.
In fact, we dispute them all. All 77 witnesses are lying. Yeah, right. We dispute them all, but we will accept that those are the facts that you have available to you, Judge Chutkan, to make your ruling on what is an official presidential act and what is not, and then we will move on to our oral arguments on that topic. That is what I suspect will happen.
Why do I suspect that will happen, Brian? Because I don't think Donald Trump is going to want to start having Republican witness after Republican witness after Republican witness. It looks like all 77 witnesses, or most of them, are Republicans, and parade them through the courtroom day after day after day testifying about the crimes of Donald Trump.
That would not turn out so good for Donald Trump. So they'll probably waive their right to have any of these witnesses called to kind of... back up what Jack Smith put in the motion and what will be revealed in the appendix.
And they'll do it all by proffer. And then they'll just argue over what should Donald Trump have immunity for and what should he not have immunity for. That could certainly happen as early as, you know, within a week or two after Judge Chutkin makes the October 10 decision about whether the appendix should be put on the public record as well. Will she set? these arguments, these hearings for a week before the election?
She might, because I've been in court every time Judge Chutkan has said my case and the schedule in this matter will not depend on an election or an election cycle. I think more likely we're going to start to see these hearings after the election, just because all of this information now being revealed publicly, Donald Trump and his lawyers are going to have to pour through it. and decide how they want to approach the upcoming hearings and that could take a few weeks for them to kind of get fully prepared to then move into the next phase the hearings in the case Glen will you be in the courtroom absolutely okay well just one more reason for those who are watching right now to subscribe to both our channels because we will have a first-hand look at everything that's happening in these upcoming hearings which will be especially devastating for Donald Trump as we move forward here. So again, we'll put the links to both of our channels right here on this screen. I'm Brian Tyler Cohen.
And I'm Glenn Kirshner. You're watching The Legal Breakdown.