Judge Unseals New Evidence in Federal Election Case Against Trump

Judge Tanya Chutkan made public portions of a filing by prosecutors setting out their argument for why the case should go forward despite the Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.

In a sprawling legal brief partly unsealed on Wednesday, the special counsel, Jack Smith, laid out his case for why former President Donald J. Trump is not immune from prosecution on federal charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election.

The redacted brief, made public by Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington, adds new details to the already extensive public record of how Mr. Trump lost the race but attempted nonetheless to cling to power.

Part of the brief focuses, for example, on a social media post that Mr. Trump sent on the afternoon of the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, telling supporters that Vice President Mike Pence had let them all down. Mr. Smith laid out extensive arguments for why that post on Twitter should be considered an unofficial act of a desperate losing candidate, rather than the official act of a president that would be considered immune from prosecution under a landmark Supreme Court ruling this summer.

After Mr. Trump’s Twitter post focused the enraged mob’s attention on harming Mr. Pence and the Secret Service took the vice president to a secure location, an aide rushed into the dining room off the Oval Office where Mr. Trump was watching television. The aide alerted him to the developing situation, in the hope that Mr. Trump would then take action to ensure Mr. Pence’s safety.

Instead, Mr. Trump looked at the aide and said only, “So what?” according to grand jury testimony newly disclosed in the brief.

Much earlier, the brief says, one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers gave him an “honest assessment” that his false claims that the election had been marred by widespread fraud would not hold up in court. But Mr. Trump seemed not to care.

“The details don’t matter,” the brief quotes Mr. Trump as saying.

Around the same time, the brief says, Mr. Pence also sought to convince Mr. Trump he had lost the election. During a private lunch in mid-November 2020, for example, Mr. Pence suggested to Mr. Trump that he accept defeat and run again in the next presidential race, but Mr. Trump did not want to hear about it.

“I don’t know,” the brief quotes him as saying, “2024 is so far-off.”

Mr. Smith’s 165-page brief was initially filed under seal last week. It was designed to help Judge Chutkan, who is overseeing the case, to determine how much of the indictment can survive the Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in July granting Mr. Trump a broad form of immunity against prosecution for many official acts while in office.

How a Judge Will Weigh Immunity in Trump’s Jan. 6 Case

How does the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity ruling apply to former President Donald J. Trump’s election-interference case? Here’s how Judge Tanya S. Chutkan will decide.

Mr. Smith and his deputies used their brief to paint all of the indictment’s many individual allegations as fair game, depicting them as examples of Mr. Trump pursuing electioneering activity in his private role as a candidate for office, not as protected acts taken in his official capacity as president.

“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” prosecutors wrote. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”

Still, despite its narrow legal purpose, the expansive brief, filed in Federal District Court in Washington, also served as something like a trial brief, setting forth Mr. Smith’s fullest exposition yet of what he has learned in his nearly two-year-long investigation of Mr. Trump.

The filing was accompanied by a lengthy sealed appendix of many of the fruits of that inquiry — F.B.I. interviews, search warrant affidavits and grand jury testimony — some of which could also soon be revealed to the public.

In its broad strokes, the special counsel’s filing to Judge Chutkan was not unlike the tome-like report issued nearly two years ago by the House select committee that investigated the events leading up to the attack of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

Mr. Smith’s submission described a familiar web of intersecting plots by Mr. Trump and his allies, including efforts to strong-arm state officials to overturn the election results, create false slates of electors claiming that Mr. Trump had won key states he actually lost and a pressure campaign against his own vice president, Mike Pence, to throw the election his way during a proceeding to certify its final outcome at the Capitol on Jan. 6.

Our Coverage of the Capitol Riot and its Fallout

The Events on Jan. 6

• Timeline: On Jan. 6, 2021, a mob of supporters of President Donald Trump raided the U.S. Capitol. Here is a close look at how the attack unfolded.
• A Day of Rage: Using thousands of videos and police radio communications, a New York Times investigation reconstructed in detail what happened — and why.
• Lost Lives: A bipartisan Senate report found that at least seven people died in connection with the attack.
• Jan. 6 Attendees: To many of those who attended the Trump rally but never breached the Capitol, Jan. 6 wasn’t a dark day for the nation. It was a new start.