Jack Smith has 77 potential witnesses in Donald Trump’s election case

Special prosecutor Jack Smith lists 77 potential witnesses in a classified court testimony that details election subversion evidence against former President Donald Trump.

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan on Wednesday released Smith’s 165-page redacted document presenting government evidence against the Republican presidential candidate, who has pleaded not guilty to four federal felony charges related to efforts to overturn his 2020 election defeat and the U.S. Capitol. the January 6 attack that followed.

Smith’s document includes references to six anonymous co-conspirators who were already mentioned in Trump’s indictment. It also mentions 77 possible witnesses, designated by numbers following the letter “P”.

While all of the names mentioned in Smith’s filing have been redacted, some of them can be easily identified through context clues such as job titles and references to publicly available social media posts.

Legal analyst Lisa Rubin he said during a Wednesday appearance on MSNBC that she was surprised by the number of potential witnesses in Smith’s testimony, which includes evidence that Chutkan will use to determine whether the allegations against Trump conflict with his claim for presidential immunity.

“One of the things that immediately strikes me is how many of the people here are identified simply by the number ‘P,’ meaning that these are not people who are alleged co-conspirators, but people who are alleged witnesses or participants in a crime event,” Rubin said. “There are so many of them that even on page 13, as far as I could find, there is a mention of P76.”

“A lot of these people are people who came from the campaign world,” she continued. “Anyone who has worked alone for the (Trump) campaign and has never been on the executive staff, the government believes these interactions between them are fair.”

In a statement sent by e-mail to: Newsweek, Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden secretly orchestrated Chutkan’s decision to open the document as part of an attempt to “interfere” in the November presidential election.

“The release of the falsely based, unconstitutional J6 brief in the immediate wake of Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is yet another clear attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American democracy and interfere in this election,” Cheung said.

“Deranged Jack Smith and the radical Democrats in Washington are determined to weaponize the Department of Justice in an attempt to stay in power,” he added. “President Trump is dominating and radical Democrats across the Deep State are panicking. This entire affair is a partisan, unconstitutional witch hunt that must be completely rejected, along with ALL other Democrat hoaxes.”

In late August, Smith filed an updated indictment against Trump, bringing the case in line with a summer Supreme Court ruling that granted immunity to sitting presidents when performing certain “official” activities.

The new indictment removes all accusations against Trump that he tried to pressure the Justice Department to falsely declare that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory was the result of massive fraud.

More than 60 lawsuits filed by Trump and his associates based on allegations of voter fraud in 2020 have been dismissed by courts across the country.

Earlier this week, Trump’s legal team filed a memo trying to persuade Chutkan to keep “sensitive” information secret while accusing Smith of wanting to publish a “politically motivated manifesto” shortly before the November presidential election.

Smith quickly responded to the Trump team’s memo, denying that he had any political motivation to pursue Trump and insisting that his plan to release evidence was “rooted in faithful application of the D.C. Circuit’s binding jurisprudence.”

“Defendant’s objection includes his standard and unsubstantiated claim that the government’s position is motivated by improper political considerations,” Smith wrote. “This allegation is false – just as it was false when the Court denied defendant’s motion to dismiss the case on the grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.”

In her Wednesday ruling allowing the unsealing of Smith’s document, Chutkan condemned the Trump team for accusing Smith of “bad faith partisan bias.”

“These allegations, for which defendant provides no support, continue a pattern of defenses focusing on political rhetoric rather than raising legal issues,” Chutkan wrote.

“Not only is this focus unresponsive and unhelpful to the court, but it is also inappropriate for experienced counsel and undermines the judicial process in this case,” she added.

The judge also wrote that a request by Trump’s lawyers to remove job titles and other clues about the context of potential witnesses will not be granted because the positions of the named people are “central” to the evidence against the former president and will be needed for “the public to understand the court’s final decision on immunity.” “.

Update 10/2, 7:48 PM ET: This article has been updated to include a statement from Trump campaign communications director Steven Cheung.