Jack Smith Exposed the Insanity of the Supreme Court’s Immunity Ruling

In this way, the brief is an inadvertent road map for how to lead a legally bulletproof insurrection. All Trump or a similarly minded future president would have to do is to execute his coup via government officials only, and in the guise of supposedly “official” acts—say, via the military—and it could not be prosecuted. As long as he hired his co-conspirators, as official government employees, he would be all set.

Some of the strongest evidence in the brief focuses on the connections between Trump’s efforts to dispute the election, despite the overwhelming evidence that he had lost, and his threats against Mike Pence, as Trump repeatedly tried to force his vice president not to play his official role and in effect block the transition of power to a new president. But Smith is careful in his characterizations, distinguishing between Trump’s role as president and his role as a candidate: The brief argues that none of Trump’s attempts to pressure Pence should be regarded as “official” acts within the role accorded the president in terms of elections; instead, these were Trump’s campaign decisions, as a private citizen.

The most shocking evidence, as many news outlets highlighted on Wednesday, came in the connections between a series of Trump’s tweets, which Smith carefully shows are “private” acts, and Trump’s orchestration of a pressure campaign against Pence to not count the votes. Trump threatened Pence that he would be hated by hundreds of thousands of people, and then issued a tweet calling them to the U.S Capitol to protest. Finally, on January 6, when Pence had not yielded to such pressure, Trump tweeted a message at 2:24 p.m. that essentially sicced the crowd on him—and then, when warned by an aide of the danger Pence was in, responded, “So what?”