Former President Donald Trump blasted the Department of Justice on Tuesday, accusing the agency of “election interference” for unsealing critical evidence against him about one month before Election Day.
A federal judge unsealed a 165-page court filing Tuesday chock full of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s argumentation and evidence against Trump in the ongoing election interference case.
“For 60 days prior to an election, the department of injustice is supposed to do absolutely nothing that would taint or interfere with a case,” Trump wrote on TruthSocial. “They disobeyed their own rule in favor of complete and total election interference. I did nothing wrong, they did! The case is a scam, just like all of the others, including the documents case, which was dismissed!”
Trump’s comments Tuesday refer to the “60-day rule,” the DOJ’s practice of avoiding major legal announcements just before the election. That rule was thrust into the forefront when the FBI held a press conference about Hillary Clinton’s emails before the 2016 election.
“Democrats are Weaponizing the Justice Department against me because they know I am WINNING, and they are desperate to prop up their failing Candidate, Kamala Harris,” Trump said. “The DOJ pushed out this latest ‘hit job’ today because JD Vance humiliated Tim Walz last night in the Debate. The DOJ has become nothing more than an extension of Joe’s, and now Kamala’s, Campaign. This is egregious PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT, and should not have been released right before the Election. The Democrat Party is turning America into a Third World Country that tries to censor, harass, and intimidate their Political Opponents.”
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that Trump had a certain level of presumptive immunity for his official acts as president, though that naturally raised the legal debate over which actions qualify as “official.”
Smith’s filing addresses that issue, arguing Trump is not exempt.
“Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role,” the filing reads.
The filling gives a window into Smith’s angle in the case and the evidence he will put forward in the coming months.
From the filing:
With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R.Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.
