Here’s 'the real force' of Jack Smith’s bombshell filing: columnist

07 October 2024

In a Monday column published by The Atlantic, Princeton history professor Sean Wilentz explains how special counsel Jack Smith's massive filing in Donald Trump's presidential immunity case outsmarts the US Supreme Court.

The filing, according to Wilentz, "both fleshes out and sharpens the evidence of Donald Trump’s sprawling criminal conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election."

Filed to the D.C. District Court last week, Wilentz writes that Smith's filing, by "skillfully quoting from or alluding to language in the Court majority’s own opinion," destroys " the notion that Trump’s activities, culminating on January 6, deserve immunity."

Furthermore, the history professor submits that although the filing "never challenges the conservative majority directly," it "makes a case, incontrovertible in its logic and factual detail, that the core of Trump’s subversion involved no official actions" at all.

The history professor writes:

[The filing] persuasively argues, with fact after fact, that Trump was the head of an entirely private criminal plot as a candidate to overthrow the election, hatched months before the election itself. In remounting his case, Smith has taken the opportunity to release previously unknown details, some of which he says he doesn’t even plan to present at trial, that underscore the depravity as well as the extent of Trump’s criminal actions.

"But the real force of Smith’s filing is in its tight presentation of the evidence of a criminal conspiracy in minute detail," Wilentz emphasizing, "dating back to the summer before the 2020 election, when Trump began publicly casting doubts on its legitimacy should he not be declared the winner."

The Atlantic's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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