Special Counsel Proposes Making Public More Evidence From Trump Election Case
The New York Times
Jack Smith is seeking to disclose quotations from secret grand jury testimony and interviews, but is proposing to shield witness identities.
The special counsel, Jack Smith, has asked a federal judge to make public a substantial amount of the evidence that he and his deputies have collected during nearly two years of investigating former President Donald J. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election, according to a court filing unsealed on Friday.
In the filing, Mr. Smith described the sorts of information about Mr. Trump that he would like to reveal in a public version of a lengthy secret brief that he submitted under seal on Thursday evening to Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference case in Federal District Court in Washington.
The sealed brief, which may have been as long as 180 pages with a lengthy additional attachment of exhibits, was Mr. Smith’s attempt to defend his indictment of Mr. Trump against the Supreme Court’s recent ruling granting him a broad form of immunity against criminal prosecution for official acts.
Mr. Smith told Judge Chutkan that the public version of his brief should include quotations and summaries of grand jury testimony from — and interviews with — several chief witnesses in the case, including top White House officials like former Vice President Mike Pence. But to protect lesser-known witnesses from harassment, Mr. Smith said the names of people not already identified in the indictment should be redacted.
“The public’s interest is fully vindicated by accessing the substantive material in the government’s filing,” Mr. Smith wrote. “For example, the unredacted substance of what a witness said is more important, for purposes of public access, than the redacted identity of the specific person who said it.”
Both Mr. Smith’s filing and the subsequent discussions of how much of its evidence should be released are a direct result of the Supreme Court’s ruling on immunity. That ruling granted Mr. Trump — and all other future former presidents — wide protections against prosecution from charges arising from most of their official actions.
