Immunity Doesn’t Apply to Trump for January 6

Despite Donald Trump’s heroic efforts to dismiss, downplay, and otherwise memorialize his shameful role in instigating the January 6, 2021 MAGA coup attempt, this insane moment in Republican political history continues to pop up like the madwoman in the attic in a Victorian novel . In this week’s vice presidential debate, a standout exchange came near the end when J. D. Vance brazenly lied about the transfer of power to the Biden White House as a smooth and peaceful affair. Then, when confronted by his opponent Tim Waltz on a key question about whether he thinks Trump has lost the 2020 election, Vance refused to answer, saying he was “only talking about the future.”

Well, January 6 there is in the future when Trump returns to the presidency, and federal prosecutor Jack Smith, who is leading the long-term prosecution of Trump for his central role in promoting the coup attempt, unmistakably brought that point to a close with a recent statement in support of his indictment. In August of this year, Smith was forced to rework his case by changing the indictment after the Supreme Court made a ridiculous decision limiting Trump. an unfathomably broad protection of executive immunity for the position of president. New 165-page document from Smith provides a detailed factual basis for his argument that Trump is not covered by this broad new immunity protection when it comes to the election he sought to overturn because “where the defendant is acting as an office-seekernot the officethe holderdoes not give immunity.”

The chronology of facts in the documents shows just how maniacal and deranged Trump has become in his bid to hold on to the presidency — to the point where he deliberately dismissed the actual results of the election. During Trump’s months-long crusade to discredit the vote without any evidence, one White House staffer overheard him telling his non-adjutants Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner: “It doesn’t matter if you win the election or lose it. You still have to fight like hell.’

It was the de facto motto of the entire baseless attack on free and fair elections. As election officials in downtown Detroit continued to count ballots the day after the election, a group of GOP protesters, enamored with false “stop the theft” rhetoric, tried to break into the building and disrupt the count. An operative at the scene sent a message to a Trump campaign representative whose identity is redacted in the document but who appears to be the campaign’s chief operating officer, Mike Roman. That campaign official initially countered earlier text suggesting the vote count was legitimate with the directive, “Find a reason why it wasn’t.” Now they say the standoff could turn into something else.”The Brooks Brothers Rebellion” — the campaign operation orchestrated by Roger Stone that thwarted a critical recount in Florida after the 2000 election — the official responded, “Make them riot. Do it!!!”

That was the ethos of Team Trump and January 6, as the Smith dossier makes painfully clear. As frantic White House officials tried to force Trump to issue a statement calling on the Jan. 6 rioters to back down, Trump instead begrudgingly retreated to the White House dining room to watch TV and tweet. That’s when he posted a fateful tweet calling out his vice president, Mike Pence, for not having the “guts” to nullify the election results and give Congress the non-existent power to cancel the ballots of 81 million Americans. Pence’s Secret Service was soon forced to evacuate him from the Capitol because, according to Smith’s statement, “the accused personally posted the tweet … at a time when he already knew the Capitol had been hacked.” When another White House aide informed Trump about Pence’s evacuation when the rioters came within 40 feet of him, Trump responded, “So what?”

Whatever else it is, it is clearly not the behavior of a President of the United States fulfilling his constitutional oath or fulfilling the duties of his office. As noted in Smith’s statement, the president has no specific role in overseeing or approving election results — for the obvious reason that doing so would constitute a serious conflict of interest.

Many of the other revelations in Smith’s report echo the well-known timeline of lies, evasions, threats, and incitement to violence and mayhem recorded during Trump’s second impeachment and in the report Committee of the US House of Representatives on the terrorist attack on January 6. There is a deplorable promotion of false claims of election fraud during the tense vote count after the Arizona and Georgia elections — and a complete lack of any supporting evidence. There are ludicrous claims of rigged voting machine algorithms operated by nefarious entities in foreign countries. There is a gathering of “fake voters” to swoop in and reverse the results of the MAGA-fueled crisis that Trump dreamed of starting. The high cynicism of this maneuver was echoed in the posts of another Trump campaign lawyer, apparently Mike Chesebar, who unironically called the fake voters just that.

Even at this late point in MAGA’s deplorable history of demagoguery and delusion, the details of the entire deeply cynical, authoritarian, counter-empirical putsch are horrifying. Among other things, Smith’s paper dramatizes how the shift to the modern imperial presidency—a trend that the Roberts immunity ruling put on steroids—threatens basic functions of democratic government, from protecting access to the ballot to (after J.D. Vance) the peaceful transfer of power. In his Jan. 6 speech at the Capitol Ellipsis, Trump repeated his advice to Ivanka and Jared, telling a crowd of budding rioters that they needed to “fight like hell” against the sinister takeover by the Biden organization or they “won’t have a country.” Yet this sobering documentary examination of Trump’s election fraud and path to incitement to violence reveals that the real forces threatening our country are the GOP’s ruling elite.