Trump Case Report Volume 1
This report deals with J6; The FL case report has been held back due to the ongoing trial of Trump's employees, Nauta and DeOliviera.
Early Tuesday morning, at about 1 am ET, Merrick Garland released Special Counsel Jack Smith’s first case report volume, the J6 case against Trump.
Mr. Smith, who was appointed as special counsel just days after Trump announced his candidacy, spends the first several pages trying to convince us all that he operated autonomously from the DOJ, and that no one there had any influence over his decisions. However, this is the same case where when Trump requested to know what federal agencies had helped with the investigation, Smith insisted that no other agencies had helped. He and his team walked into the office to find all the evidence they needed just sitting there, waiting for him. Where did all those boxes of evidence come from? The evidence fairy, apparently, because no other agencies contributed any help, he swears.
The report’s first section is similar to the Smith filing, released last October by Judge Chutkan, that outlined his case. The section on the riot makes no mention of the more than two dozen federal informants that the FBI admits were in the crowd that day.
The second section deals with the laws Smith claims Trump broke, the possible defenses Trump could use, and how he would have overcome them. For instance, Smith planned to charge a violation of 18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2), but to do so, he would have to overcome the recent SCOTUS decision in Fischer V US, which held that (c)(2) had to be limited to the conduct described in (c)(1). Smith thinks he could overcome Fischer because SCOTUS mentioned that creating false evidence would count towards the altering of evidence. Because Trump and company made “fake” elector slates and wanted to substitute them for the real ones, Smith claims those forms count as creating false evidence. However, when reading the SCOTUS opinion, it’s clear that they feel that 1512(c) is about closing a loophole in Sarbanes-Oxley so that the person who shredded the Enron documents could be held as liable as the person who ordered the shredding. The law in question seems to be referencing the destruction of evidence in a current investigation, not the creation of an alternate slate of electors during an election, which would later be investigated. It would be one thing if Smith were alleging that Trump ordered the alternate elector forms altered after the investigation was announced to hinder it, but that’s not what happened here. Then again, I am not a lawyer. I just watch a lot of LawTube and read a lot of legal documents.