Jack Smith not letting go of that bone.
More on the new indictment.
(From Washington Post)
In a written notice to the court, Smith said the indictment was filed “by a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case” and that it “reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions.”
Smith said he will not seek to have Trump arraigned again on the new version of the four-count indictment, and still expects to make a joint proposal later this week about how to schedule a new set of pretrial hearings.
The original 45-page indictment has been reduced to 36 pages, after prosecutors removed a series of allegations that the Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority said were wrongly filed. Specifically, those allegations related to an effort by Trump in late 2020 to make the Justice Department support his false claims of potential voter fraud.
That means Trump is no longer charged with trying to force his Justice Department to conduct sham election fraud investigations and to urge state legislators to meet and choose fraudulent electors over the legitimate ones. The Supreme Court ruled that interactions between a president and his Justice Department would be considered an official presidential act that is immune from prosecution.
The removal of those allegations also means the indictment no longer accuses someone identified in the original document only as “Co-Conspirator No. 4,” but who people familiar with the case have said is former Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. Those people spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss parts of the investigation that had not been made public.
Clark’s removal from the case means that instead of six uncharged co-conspirators in the indictment, there are now five — most of them lawyers who advised Trump on his efforts to undo the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The indictment is tailored to the Supreme Court’s criticism of Smith’s approach, and their conclusion that a president or former president cannot be charged for official acts. The court also ruled that evidence of official acts for the most part cannot be used against a former president in a criminal trial.
As a result, the indictment tries to underscore more clearly that Trump and his co-conspirators allegedly acted in their unofficial capacities.
“These co-conspirators included the following individuals, none of whom were government officials during the conspiracies and all of whom were acting in a private capacity,” the new language in the superseding indictment says.