Welcome to the weekend! Here are the strengths of the white collar of the week:
Last week, there were important developments in the DC affair.
Annex to Jack Smith UNCELLÉ: You will remember last week that judge Chutkan granted Jack Smith’s request to file an exposed version of the evidence that he submitted to his request on immunity on the public file. At Trump’s request, she agreed to maintain her order for seven days to give her lawyer time to assess the “dispute options”.
In a somewhat surprising way, Trump’s lawyer did not ask a superior court to intervene. Instead, the day the stay was to expire, they filed another request to the Chutkan judge asking him to extend the stay until November 14, the day Trump will deposit his own brief and annex. His lawyers argued that the publication of Smith’s evidence before the evidence of the defense would be unfair and could incorrectly hinder the jury pool, and that the two parties should deposit their proofs at the same time. They also repeated their now familiar arguments that the accusation is equivalent to electoral interference and that additional evidence should not be published during this significant period, when the early vote has already started.
Later the same day, judge Chutkan rejected these arguments. She noted that there is a presumption in favor of procedural acts in a criminal case being public and that Trump had not met the legal standards which could justify keeping everything under the seal. She wrote that her arguments concerning a possible influence of jurors were too speculative and that such potential problems were better treated when selecting the jury. She rejected her assertion that the two parties should file everything simultaneously, noting that in the ordinary course, one side is fixed and that the other responds and it is “simply how the dispute works”. She also noted that if Trump’s advice are really worried about it, they are free to put their own papers at any time and do not need to wait until November 14.
Finally, judge Chutkan again rejected the idea that the electoral or political calendar should play a role in his decisions. In fact, she noted, it was Trump’s requested delay that might seem to be an electoral interference:
There is undoubtedly a public interest in the courts which do not insert in the elections or did not do so. . . . But the accessory effects of the dispute on politics are not the same as the intentional interference of a court with them. Consequently, it is in fact the reparation requested by the defendant so that the risks of undermining this public interest: if the court hid information according to which the public had the right to access only because of the potential political consequences of the publication, which the deduction could itself constitute – or seems to be – an electoral interference. The court will therefore continue to maintain political considerations away from its decision -making, rather than incorporating them as a defendant.
She ordered the clerk to release the appendix to the public file on Friday. This gave Trump lawyers for the evening to ask for an emergency stay. They chose not to do it, and Friday morning, the Appendix Expurged was published.
And after all this noise, it was quite anticlimatic. The appendix is in four volumes and totals 1889 pages. More than half of it is expelled and remains under the seal. The rest is mainly equipment that was already public containing information that we already knew. There were no big new bombs; Insofar as there are, they are contained in the transcriptions of the Grand Jury, the interviews of witnesses and other materials which will remain under Seal until the trial.
Here’s how the appendix breaks down:
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Volume I – 723 pages, most of it. The parties that are not exploded are the transcriptions of witness interviews with the committee of the Chamber of January 6. I assume that the rest of this volume is transcriptions of testimonies of the great jury or interviews with witnesses to the FBI, which would explain why he remains in Seal.
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Volume II – 246 pages. It seems to be the volume of “social media”. A large part is expurued, but the unidalized portions are images of publications on Trump’s social networks and others.
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Volume III – 536 pages. This is also strongly expurd, but what remains is a kind of information bag which was already public, such as press releases, statements by state officials and other information on state elections (and lack of fraud); Extracts from Mike Pence’s book; Transcriptions of Trump’s speeches on the ellipse and in Georgia; and documents related to the scheme of false voters, including the service notes describing the program of the lawyer Ken Chesebro.
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Volume IV – 384 pages, almost entirely expelled. The limited amount which is public includes certain budget and planning documents linked to the rally on the ellipse on January 6.
Overall, the fight against the appendix seems to have been a lot of relatively little knot. It is difficult to know why Trump lawyers fought so hard to prevent this being deposited – unless it is simply to have the fight itself and another opportunity to argue that the whole prosecution is equivalent to electoral interference.
Smith opposes dismissal according to Fischer:: Jack Smith put his opposition to Trump’s additional request to reject the indictment last week. The main argument focuses on the counts two and three, who invoice the obstruction of justice and the conspiracy to hinder justice. Trump claims that the recent Decision of the Supreme Court in FISCHER c. UNITED STATES obliges the dismissal of these charges.
