Special Counsel Jack Smith’s explosive 165-page filing alleging that Donald Trump knew his claims were false and his efforts to cling to power were illegal is the most damning evidence yet against the ex-president, but some legal experts argue it also serves as an indictment of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Smith filed his brief, “the most comprehensive look at the evidence federal prosecutors have amassed in their case,” CBS News reports, last week under seal. U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is overseeing the election interference and subversion case against Trump and was directed by the Supreme Court to determine which of Trump’s actions were “official acts” not subject to prosecution, released the motion on Wednesday. Smith’s filing contains “damning evidence against Trump,” as MSNBC reported, never before seen by the American public.

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith’s filing reads. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”

Some legal experts are angered at the Supreme Court’s actions which have delayed the trial, and, should Trump win re-election, they say, have effectively killed it.

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“The unsealed evidence in the January 6 case underscores how outrageous it was that the Supreme Court blocked Donald Trump’s criminal trial this year. It amounts to a judicially executed cover up,” charges Michael Waldman, President of the Brennan Center for Justice. Waldman was appointed by President Joe Biden in 2021 to the Presidential Commission on the Supreme Court of the United States, which issued a report on court reforms.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, knowing Donald Trump’s claims of “presidential immunity” ultimately would be adjudicated by the Supreme Court, had asked the Court on December 11, 2023 to rule on the ex-president’s assertions. In making what he acknowledged was “an extraordinary request,” as SCOTUSblog reported, the Special Counsel “contended that it ‘is of paramount importance’ that Trump’s claims of immunity ‘be resolved as expeditiously as possible.'”

Urging “a cautious, deliberative manner,” and not a resolution at “breakneck speed,” Trump’s lawyers told the Court they opposed expedited review. “Haste makes waste,” they said, according to SCOTUSblog.

One day later Smith replied, writing that the “public interest in a prompt resolution of this case favors an immediate, definitive decision by this Court.”

On December 22, the Court refused.

It wasn’t until April 18, 2024, that the Supreme Court agreed to hear Trump’s claims of presidential immunity. The Court heard oral arguments one week later, on April 25, but waited until the last day of its session, July 1, to release what became its landmark 6-3 ruling on presidential immunity. From the point where Smith first asked the Court to resolve the issue to the date it handed down its decision was more than six months.

Marcy Wheeler, who writes about civil rights and national security, dug into the 165-page filing and slammed the Chief Justice.

“John Roberts not only rewrote the Constitution to protect Donald Trump,” Wheeler charges. “He forced prosecutors to spend 14 pages arguing that it is not among the job duties of the President of the United States to attack Republicans who’ve crossed him on Twitter.”

“This is what the Chief Justice wants to protect. This is the all-powerful President John Roberts wants to have. Someone who can sit in his dining room siccing mobs on fellow Republicans.”

Professor of law Richard “Rick” Hasen, an internationally-recognized expert in election law and campaign finance, on Wednesday blasted the Supreme Court.

“Jack Smith’s Big New Jan. 6 Brief Is a Major Indictment of the Supreme Court,” is Hasen’s headline at Slate. In it, he explains his “anger is at the Supreme Court for depriving the American people of the chance for a full public airing of Donald Trump’s attempt to use fraud and trickery to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential victory before voters consider whether to put Trump back in office beginning January 2025.”

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He warns, “there is about an even chance that this will be the last evidence produced by the federal government of this nefarious plot. If Donald Trump wins election next month, the end of this prosecution is certain and the risks of future election subversion heightened.”

“And now,” Hasen laments, “perhaps the most important case in American history may never get to a jury and the American public will never get a chance to learn about this evidence and a jury’s judgment of this evidence before they consider returning Donald Trump to office.”

Hasen blames “then–Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s refusal to support Donald Trump’s conviction in the Senate after the House impeached him for these activities,” and “Joe Biden’s Attorney General Merrick Garland, who dragged his feet for well over a year before taking decisive action against the biggest threat to American democracy since the Civil War of the 1860s. His timidity is inexplicable and disappointing.”

“But worst of all is the United States Supreme Court,” Hasen charges, before also pointing to the actions of Chief Justice John Roberts:

“The New York Times recently reported on the internal Supreme Court deliberations, and they paint Chief Justice John Roberts, author of the Trump immunity decision, as having turned from a justice known for seeking common ground and minimalist outcomes to one set out to protect the office of the presidency at all costs. The opinion was so focused on the risks to the vigorousness of the activities of future presidents that could come from the threat of future prosecutions that it was willing to ignore the current threat to democracy today from Trump’s actions in 2020, not to mention his continued insistence that he won the last election.”

With damning charges Hasen concludes: “The fact that no jury may pass on the deadly serious allegations in Smith’s complaint will do more than simply let Trump and others off the hooks for their potential crimes. It will make future criminal activity related to American elections much more likely. And it all could have been avoided if McConnell, Garland, and especially the Supreme Court had done the right thing.”

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Image: Fred Schilling, Collection of the Supreme Court of the United States

The first and only vice presidential debate of 2024 was effectively a tie, according to a poll from CBS News which hosted the event. The mainstream media remarked on the surprisingly “civil” tone and “policy-driven” answers. And although U.S. Senator JD Vance‘s refusal to say Donald Trump lost the 2020 election may become the most-recognized remarks of the night, the Ohio Republican’s comments—and lies—on abortion are being seen as damning.

“If there was a jaw-dropping moment of the night, it was Vance’s answer on abortion. Vance acknowledged that there are a lot of Americans who don’t agree with what he’s said on the issue,” Punchbowl News reported, appearing to praise the GOP vice presidential nominee. “Then Vance flatly declared that Americans don’t trust Republicans when it comes to abortion.”

“We’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American people’s trust back on this issue, where they frankly just don’t trust us,” Vance said.

What Vance did not say is why Americans don’t trust the Republican Party on abortion, and, as he said later during the debate, “don’t agree with” what’s he’s said on abortion.

Many said it’s his lies, one of which MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow later fact-checked.

JD Vance claimed he never supported a national abortion ban.

Rachel Maddow has the fact check. pic.twitter.com/ElTAKzRGGT

— MSNBC (@MSNBC) October 2, 2024

“Vance lied so much about his record on abortion,” noted HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery, with receipts (below).

“Holy Jesus,” remarked Esquire’s veteran liberal pundit Charles P. Pierce during the debate, “this abortion answer from Vance is such a heap of lies.”

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U.S. Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) observed, “Vance says his party’s support for abortion is really unpopular so they need [to] work harder to ‘win people’s trust’. In other words, they are DEFINITELY going to pass an abortion ban and just work harder to pull one over on you.”

PoliticusUSA’s Sarah Reese Jones remarked: “The abortion segment was by far the worst for JD Vance, who is already having a bad debate.”

Legal scholar and University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University Laurence Tribe remarked: “JD Vance told the biggest whopper of the night when he denied ever publicly supporting a national abortion ban. He’s on record having supported such a ban. Jaw-dropping.”

During the debate (full transcript via CBS News), Vance was asked point-blank: “Will you create a federal pregnancy monitoring agency?”

“No,” he told CBS News debate moderator Norah O’Donnell, “certainly we won’t.”

That was the extent of his response to that specific question—but he went on to talk extensively about abortion.

“I want to talk about this issue because I know a lot of Americans care about it, and I know a lot of Americans don’t agree with everything that I’ve ever said on this topic,” Vance acknowledged. “And, you know, I grew up in a working class family in a neighborhood where I knew a lot of young women who had unplanned pregnancies and decided to terminate those pregnancies because they feel like they didn’t have any other options. And, you know, one of them is actually very dear to me. And I know she’s watching tonight, and I love you. And she told me something a couple years ago that she felt like if she hadn’t had that abortion, that it would have destroyed her life because she was in an abusive relationship.”

“And I think that what I take from that, as a Republican who proudly wants to protect innocent life in this country, who proudly wants to protect the vulnerable is that my party, we’ve got to do so much better of a job at earning the American People’s trust back on this issue where they frankly just don’t trust us.”

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Laura Chapin, a Democratic communications strategist, responded on social media: “A note to the male pundits opining on the #VPDebate2024 : every woman in America heard @JDVance say his friend in an abusive relationship should have had her abuser’s baby and remain tied to him for the rest of her life.”

“I take this very personally,” Chapin added, “because that’s what happened to one of MY friends: she was 19 years old, in an abusive relationship, and had an abortion so she could escape his control and not be tied to him forever.”

Jessica Valenti, who writes a daily Substack on abortion, observed, “Vance tells the story of a friend who said she needed an abortion in order to leave an abusive relationship, but doesn’t say that the law he supports would have forced her to stay.”

As some have noted, Vance has suggested people in abusive, “even violent” marriage should stay together. His remarks have been thoroughly analyzed and he has issued a statement that offers no definitive answer, but his remarks during Tuesday night’s debate would make it appear that is what he believes.

“I find myself wanting to believe Vance’s moments expressing empathy,” remarked “The View” co-host Alyssa Farah Griffin, who served as Trump White House Director of Strategic Communications and Assistant to the President. “Then I remember the entire persona he spent the last 5 years building as an internet bully who derides women, doesn’t care about war-torn Ukraine, & didn’t care about how his lies impacted Springfield.”

MSNBC Legal Analyst Kristy Greenberg, a former SDNY Criminal Division Deputy Chief, went even further in dissecting Vance’s remarks.

“At the VP debate, JD Vance said a woman he loves told him she was in an abusive relationship and had an abortion. His takeaway: shame that women don’t trust Republicans. And then he lied repeatedly,” she wrote, enumerating some of his lies and actions:

“1. He said he never supported a national abortion ban; he campaigned on eliminating abortion 2 years ago.

2. He said he supports fertility treatments; he and Republicans voted against Democrats’ bill establishing a nationwide right to IVF.

3. He said he supports affordable child care; he was a no show on Democrats’ bill to expand the child tax credit, which Republicans blocked.”

“My takeaway,” she concludes, “shame that women can’t trust Republicans because they lie. They say they support popular policies that help women when they don’t. We must call out their lies and expose the ugly truth every single time.”

CNN in July reported, “‘JD Vance said in 2022 he ‘would like abortion to be illegal nationally’.”

That same month HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery reported: “JD Vance Said We Just Need To Reframe The Idea Of Forcing Women To Stay Pregnant.” Bendery also posted a screenshot from his official Senate website which reads: “End Abortion.” She says that was later scrubbed from the site.

Vance lied so much about his record on abortion.

He straight-up wanted to “end abortion,” something he put on his own Senate campaign website — until Trump tapped him to be VP, and then he quickly scrubbed that.

Got a screenshot at the time tho: https://t.co/HX2cP8V2CT

— Jennifer Bendery (@jbendery) October 2, 2024

Watch the video above or at this link.

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The alleged Trump campaign dossier on JD Vance, reportedly obtained by Iranian hackers and sent to several media outlets that refused to publish it, has now been published.

Assuming the document is genuine, it sheds light on JD Vance, Donald Trump, and their campaign, offering important insights—not so much about Vance’s positions or liabilities, but about the thoroughness of the vetting process for a vice-presidential candidate running alongside a 78-year-old Donald Trump, whose health and fitness for office have long been strongly questioned.

Journalist Ken Klippenstein, a reporter formerly at The Intercept, obtained a copy of the dossier and decided to publish it in its entirety on Thursday. He says he decided to publish the dossier because “it’s of keen public interest in an election season.”

“If the document had been hacked by some ‘anonymous’ like hacker group, the news media would be all over it. I’m just not a believer of the news media as an arm of the government, doing its work combatting foreign influence. Nor should it be a gatekeeper of what the public should know,” Klippenstein argued.

After he published it, Klippenstein’s Twitter account was “temporarily suspended,” according to The Verge, though the reason for the suspension is not entirely clear. He remains suspended, as of publication time. Around the same time on Thursday, coincidentally, a federal grand jury indicted several Iranian nationals for hacking-related charges involving Trump’s 2024 campaign, according to Politico.

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Several journalists have explained why they would not publish the dossier, and others, like the Columbia Journalism Review, have examined the issue. Judd Legum, founder of Popular information, wrote on Tuesday that “Popular Information will not publish or excerpt the Trump campaign materials…The materials are stolen, and publishing the documents would be a violation of privacy and could encourage future criminal acts.”

He adds that the documents “may be embarrassing or problematic to members of the Trump campaign. Some of the documents have news value. But the stolen materials do not provide the public with any fundamental new insight about Trump or his campaign. So, on balance, the relevant factors argue against publication.”

Others disagree.

Boing Boing, founded in 1988, reported: “You can finally read the Trump campaign’s dossier on J.D. Vance. Boy does J.D. Vance hate Trump.”

Which begs the question, why did Donald Trump decide to invite him to be his vice-presidential running mate, and why did Senator Vance accept?

“The dossier serves as a massive compilation of all the times Vance has shat on Trump—a truly staggering collection lies therein and it would take a savant to figure out if any of the remarks are previously unreported. He calls Trump a liar, a fraud, a failure, too ambivalent about Nazis. He does not believe the 2020 election was fraudulent. He believes in evolution,” Boing Boing reported. It adds, Vance holds “a near-total contempt for Trump himself that extended to countless insults and accusations of rape, racism and all the rest of it.”

Vanity Fair on Tuesday reported, “The work itself is incomplete; the 271-page rundown on Vance is inexplicably missing Vance’s now infamous ‘childless cat ladies’ comment from a 2021 interview with Tucker Carlson on Fox, said one reporter. The file does include Vance’s comments from 2016 in which he called Trump ‘an idiot’ and privately compared him to Hitler.”

The Bulwark on Friday agreed: “what stands out is not what’s in the 271-page file, but what was left out.”

Assuming the document is real and the final version, the Trump campaign’s vetting appears to have been inaccurate, insufficient, and sloppy. It was either unable or uninterested in executing one of the most basic requirements of a campaign: vetting.

In addition to his “childless cat ladies” claim, Vance has been chastised for suggesting America should “punish” people for not having children. His belief that children should be given the “right” to vote – but those rights should go to their parents, so parents have more votes than non-parents, and that politicians should have to have children, have been denounced. Vance’s own Congressman, a Democrat, has said the Senator’s “views and beliefs” do not represent the people or values of his district, and called the campaign he’s running “one of the cruelest, most chaotic, and downright weirdest.”

Overall, Vance has become “one of the least popular vice-presidential picks this century,” according to ABC News, which reports he is “more unpopular than Sarah Palin.”

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In the section titled “POTENTIAL VULNERABILITIES” is this summary:

“JD Vance’s political journey has been marked by notable shifts and contradictions, making his stance on Donald Trump a subject of intrigue and critique.
“During the 2016 election, Vance openly opposed Trump, announcing his intention to vote third party and expressing doubt about Trump’s effectiveness. His critical views extended to likening Trump to heroin and dismissing the ‘MAGA’ movement as a ‘quick high.’ Described as a ‘never Trumper,’ Vance declared his opposition on public platforms, asserting that Trump was not the ideal candidate for white-working class voters. In 2016, Vance aligned himself with Trump’s accusers, tweeting about allegations of sexual assault and implying a skepticism of Trump’s honesty. He connected racism and xenophobia to Trump’s base of support, emphasizing racial resentment among Trump’s followers.
“Vance’s association with the American Enterprise Institute, an organization critical of Trump, adds another layer to his political affiliations. As a former writer for FrumForum, run by known ‘never Trumper’ David Frum, Vance’s connections to Trump-antagonists become more apparent. Despite initial moderate Republican and Democratic tendencies, Vance shifted his stance, actively supporting Trump’s policies and encouraging votes for him in the 2020 election.
“Vance’s political evolution raises questions about the consistency of his views and the influences shaping his positions.”

Whether the dossier reflects the full scope of Vance’s vetting by the Trump campaign is unknown. Some political analysts, like Dana Houle, suggest that the dossier may have been repurposed for the 2024 campaign.

The dossier is “old,” writes Houle a former Democratic congressional campaign manager and chief of staff, in a lengthy social media thread.

“It wasn’t prepared fresh for Trump in 2024. There are several cites that say the source website was accessed in April or May 2021. Other than a few pages it doesn’t include anything from his Senate campaign. I think this was prepared for some entity making decisions about the 2022 Senate race. Maybe it was originally done by Vance’s campaign or the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or some superPAC deciding on endorsements and where to commit resources for independent expenditure campaigns in fall 2022. It’s really heavy on loyalty to Trump, so maybe it was done by &/or for the RNC, or for the Make America Great Again PAC, to inform Trump’s endorsements.”

“My guess–definitely a guess–is this document was prepared before the 2022 election,” Houle continues, “most likely prior to Vance announcing his candidacy. Then, in February, it was pulled off the shelf and hastily updated with a few important policy areas, in particular litmus test issues like whether he’s suitably pro-Russian RE Ukraine, & whether he’s sufficiently anti-abortion to mollify from Christian Right. But, in general, this is lazy cookie-cutter basic research, but lacking any but a small amount of analysis of his Senate record or his campaign.”

“It’s certainly not the kind of research that would be used by a pre-Trump presidential campaign vetting a running mate.”

“Another possibility,” Houle offers. “When Trump started to look at running mates they were probably asked for information about their finances, legal record, etc., and Vance may have just turned over his 2021 self-oppo research, either updated by him or by the Trump people.”

Attorney, author, and writer Craig Calcaterra remarked the dossier serves “as a 271-page reminder of just how thoroughly Vance has traded in his principles for power. Just page after page documenting how utterly phony that guy is.”

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