Then Vice President Mike Pence speaks alongside then President Donald Trump during a coronavirus task force briefing in March 2020 (AP Photo/Patrick Semansky, File).
Special counsel Jack Smith’s much-anticipated public filing of a “voluminous” Jan. 6 appendix spanning over a thousand pages was in many ways a dud its docketed form on Friday, as much of the evidence against former President Donald Trump remained redacted, but the document dump nonetheless shed light on which portions of former Vice President Mike Pence’s book that prosecutors highlighted.
When the Supreme Court in July ruled in Trump v. United States and walled off Trump’s conversations with DOJ officials from evidence, the justices made clear that Smith had to rebut the “presumption of immunity” and demonstrate to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan that prosecutors’ use of Trump’s conversations with Pence ahead of Jan. 6 wouldn’t “pose any dangers of intrusion on the authority and functions of the Executive Branch.”
Since that time, prosecutors filed a lengthy immunity brief that was vehemently opposed by the defense, insisting that the special counsel’s “stubborn reliance” on Pence evidence should lead to the prompt dismissal of the case instead.
That opposition failed, and so did the defense’s most recent attempt to delay the release of the special counsel’s immunity appendix, in four volumes, until Nov. 14, past the 2024 election.
The judge on Thursday refused to grant Trump a stay extension, noting that if she granted request to keep documents from the public because of the election that “could itself constitute—or appear to be—election interference.”
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“The court will therefore continue to keep political considerations out of its decision-making, rather than incorporating them as Defendant requests,” Chutkan wrote, directing the clerk to docket the redacted appendix.
When the still largely sealed four volumes were filed, the third included examples highlighted in yellow of Pence conversations with Trump, as recalled by Pence himself in the book “So Help Me God.”
The pages of the book recount how Trump pushed Pence privately to be “tough” and overturn the election in Congress on Jan. 6 based on the theories of John Eastman, after the campaign lawyers and other outside attorneys Trump enlisted, like Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, failed to achieve that end through court challenges.
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