Trump argues against disclosure of certain details in major Jack Smith brief laying out new evidence in election case
By Tierney Sneed and Katelyn Polantz, CNN
(CNN) — Former President Donald Trump is again claiming that special counsel Jack Smith is trying to influence the November presidential election by seeking to make new evidence and witness testimony public as voters start to go to the polls.
In a court filing Tuesday, the Republican White House nominee argued that more redactions are needed in a brief that Smith has filed under seal that will present the most comprehensive view yet of the special counsel’s case that Trump acted in criminally in trying to overturn the 2020 election.
The brief is aimed at convincing the trial judge in the case – and eventually, higher courts – that Smith’s case can survive under the Supreme Court’s recent ruling that said Trump had at least some presidential immunity in the prosecution.
The immunity filing is expected to be the fullest description of the case against Trump to date – a nearly 200-page legal brief that weaves the Justice Department’s sweeping grand jury investigation around the 2020 election into a narrative, akin to an opening statement at a trial. At stake in the current dispute over redacting the brief is how much the public will learn about what investigators found in the federal election subversion probe, particularly as a Trump win in November would likely end the prosecution.
Trump opposes the public disclosure of some of the details in the still-sealed brief, claiming in Tuesday’s court filing that the “true motivation driving the efforts by the Special Counsel’s Office to disseminate witness statements that they previously sought to lock down is as obvious as it is inappropriate.”
“The Office wants their politically motivated manifesto to be public, contrary to the Justice Manual and longstanding DOJ norms in cases not involving President Trump, in the final weeks of the 2024 Presidential election while early voting has already begun throughout the United States,” Trump said.
US District Judge Tanya Chutkan is currently deciding how much of the prosecutors’ brief can be made public, after they filed their own proposal for redactions under seal alongside an unredacted version.
The filing is expected to reveal new evidence against Trump, including what several witnesses testified to in the grand jury proceedings. Sources say the proposed redactions are minimal, blacking the sources of the information and removing witness names, but leaving the substance of what they said about Trump for public view.
Trump is opposing the disclosure of some details in the Smith immunity brief, arguing that the proposed redactions do not “meaningfully mitigate the privacy and safety issues” that were a focus of a redaction debate this spring in the special counsel’s classified documents case in Florida.
Trump is calling for redactions to “titles and positions held by the witnesses who are not specifically named in the Superseding Indictment,” and also says that prosecutors should be required to justify the public disclosure of statements that witnesses made in their investigation that are included in their brief.
When Smith filed the sealed brief last week, he defended the proposed redactions as striking the balance between protecting witnesses and maintaining public access to the case.
The-CNN-Wire
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