Special counsel Jack Smith lists 77 potential witnesses in an unsealed court filing 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 outlining the government’s evidence against the Republican presidential nominee, who has pleaded not guilty to four federal felony charges related to attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss and to the January 6 U.S. Capitol attack that followed.
Smith’s document includes references to six unnamed co-conspirators who were previously referenced in Trump’s indictment. It also mentions 77 possible witnesses identified by numbers following the letter “P.”
While all of the names listed in Smith’s filing have been redacted, some are easily identified by context clues like job titles and references to publicly available social media posts.
Legal analyst Lisa Rubin said during an MSNBC appearance on Wednesday that she was surprised at the number of potential witnesses in Smith’s filling, which contains evidence that will be used by Chutkan to determine whether the charges against Trump clash with his claim of presidential immunity.
Drew Angerer; Michael M. Santiago
“One of the things that pops out at me immediately is how many people here are identified just by ‘P’ numbers, meaning they’re not people alleged to be co-conspirators, but they are people who are alleged witnesses or participants in the event,” Rubin said. “There are so many of them that even on Page 13, which is as far as I’ve gotten, there is a reference to P76.”
“Many of these people are people who came from the campaign world,” she continued. “Anyone who worked for the [Trump] campaign alone and never was a member of executive branch staff, those contacts between them are, according to the government, fair game.”
In a statement emailed to Newsweek, Trump Campaign Communications Director Steven Cheung claimed that Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden had secretly orchestrated Chutkan’s decision to unseal the document as part of an effort to “interfere” in November’s presidential election.
“The release of the falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election,” Cheung said.
“Deranged Jack Smith and Washington DC Radical Democrats are hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power,” he added. “President Trump is dominating, and the Radical Democrats throughout the Deep State are freaking out. This entire case is a partisan, Unconstitutional Witch Hunt that should be dismissed entirely, together with ALL of the remaining Democrat hoaxes.”
Smith filed an updated indictment of Trump in late August, retooling the case to comply with the Supreme Court’s summer ruling that granted immunity to sitting presidents when conducting certain “official” acts.
The new indictment removes all accusations leveled against Trump regarding attempts to pressure the Department of Justice to falsely declare that President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win was the result of massive fraud.
The 60-plus lawsuits filed by Trump and his associates alleging 2020 voter fraud were all rejected by courts across the country.
Earlier this week, Trump’s legal team filed a memo that attempted to persuade Chutkan to keep “sensitive” information under seal, while accusing Smith of wanting to release a “politically motivated manifesto” shortly before the November presidential election.
Smith quickly filed a reply to the Trump team’s memo, denying that he had any political motivations for prosecuting Trump and insisting that his plan to release the evidence was “rooted in a faithful application of binding D.C. Circuit case law.”
“The defendant’s opposition includes his standard and unsupported refrain that the Government’s position is motivated by improper political considerations,” Smith wrote. “That allegation is false—just as it was false when the Court denied the defendant’s motion to dismiss the case on grounds of selective and vindictive prosecution.”
In her ruling authorizing the unsealing of Smith’s document on Wednesday, Chutkan denounced Trump’s team for accusing Smith of having a “bad-faith partisan bias.”
“These accusations, for which Defendant provides no support, continue a pattern of defense filings focusing on political rhetoric rather than addressing the legal issues at hand,” Chutkan wrote.
“Not only is that focus unresponsive and unhelpful to the court, but it is also unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case,” she added.
The judge also wrote that a request by Trump lawyers to redact the job titles and other context clues of potential witnesses would not be granted because the jobs of the people named were “central” to the evidence against the ex-president and would be needed for “the public to understand the court’s eventual decision on immunity.”
Update 10/2, 7:48 p.m. ET: This article has been updated to include a statement from Trump Campaign Communications Director Steven Cheung.
