A four-part appendix detailing more about former President Donald Trump’s alleged criminal attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 election hit the public record on Friday.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan approved the public release on the federal criminal docket in Washington, D.C., late Thursday, following weeks of Trump requesting to keep the appendix out of the public eye.
Trump told the judge on Oct. 10 he needed more time to weigh his “litigation options” if she decided to admit the source materials publicly, arguing they could be damaging to jurors and the integrity of the case. Chutkan agreed to give him one week to respond and make his arguments at blocking the release. He filed a last-ditch motion early Thursday asking for more time, but was denied.
The appendix is split into four parts with sensitive information redacted. The four volumes total more than 1,800 pages.
Volume I is mostly transcripts of interviews with witnesses who testified before the House committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
There is a new detail in this first volume that stands out, however: testimony before the Jan. 6 committee from a White House valet to Trump.
The valet told the committee that on Jan. 6, when Trump was preparing to watch playback of his speech as violence erupted, Trump asked him if his “speech was cut off.” The valet told the committee that he tried to explain to Trump that it had been.
The record shows the valet appears to be reviewing photos with investigative counsel for the Jan. 6 committee when he is testifying about Trump’s reaction.
“And that’s pretty much the face I got the whole time, and it was kind of like he told me, Really? And I was like, yes sir,” the valet said.
This transcript with the valet has been released before — by House Republicans. But Smith’s version unmasks what they redacted.
The version published in March by Georgia Congressman Rep. Barry Loudermilk, the chair of the House Administration Subcommittee on Oversight, redacted the section where the valet tells investigators that after Trump said “let’s go see” when he was told that his speech was cut off, the valet took off Trump’s outer coat, got a television ready for him and handed him a remote.
“And he starts watching it. And I stepped out to get him a Diet Coke, come back in, and that’s pretty much it for me as he’s watching it and like, seeing it for himself,” the valet testified, according to Smith’s version.
The Republican version of the transcript also redacted when congressional investigators next asked the valet: “So, you set up the TV. Did you set it up for him to watch his speech or live coverage of what was happening at the Capitol?”
“Typically, that’s — a lot of times he’s in that back dining room a lot,” the valet said.
The contents of the transcript with the valet cut off here in Smith’s appendix once investigators asked the valet if he knew, in fact, whether Trump was watching the events at the Capitol.
Volume I also contains a previously public transcript in which Jan. 6 committee investigators ask a witness about whether Trump’s Jan. 6 speech draft was something his staffers categorised as “political” or “official.”
This is a key distinction for the special counsel’s team because it argues that Trump’s activities when he was in a campaign capacity are not official and therefore are prosecutable.
Notably, the witness first told committee investigators they didn’t recollect whether anybody told them that day if Trump’s speech at the Ellipse was a political one.
But “afterward,” the witness said, they knew that transcriptions of Trump’s speech went out via text and it was “styled ‘internal transcript.’”
“And my recollection is internal transcripts were political speeches,” the witness said.
Another transcript in the first volume features testimony from Greg Jacob, former Vice President Mike Pence’s legal counsel. The transcript in the Smith appendix redacts Jacob’s name, but a side-by-side comparison by HuffPost of the Jan. 6 committee transcript and the one Chutkan published Friday, confirms it is him.
Here the material Smith attaches to his immunity arguments zeroes in on testimony in which Jacob told the Jan. 6 committee about attempts by Trump darling and “coup memo” author John Eastman to convince Pence and Pence’s staff that a vice president had the constitutional authority to count slates and object to them.
This meant, according to Eastman, that anything in the existing legislation that governed the count, like the Electoral Count Act, was unconstitutional.
“But if we were to do what [Eastman] suggested, it would mean that none of those debates happened in Congress. None of those Senators would get to make their objections. We would be asserting we have the unilateral authority to do all of that,” Jacob testified.
Jacob expressed that Eastman appeared to understand the scheme wouldn’t work for Pence and it would be rejected if advanced.
“John, isn’t this just a terrible idea?” Jacob asked Eastman.
Eastman “didn’t quite get to saying yes,” Jacob said, but when he told Eastman that, if they took the fight all the way to the Supreme Court, they would lose 9-0, Eastman balked saying it would be 7-2 and he might have Justice Clarence Thomas on his side.
The men went over a few of Thomas’ opinions and Eastman backed off a bit, admitting he would lose 9-0.
Eastman told Jacob “they” would be “really disappointed.”
“They’re going to be really disappointed that I wasn’t able to persuade you,” Eastman allegedly told Jacob.
Eastman didn’t clarify who “they” referred to before he left the meeting with Jacob.
Volume II is heavily redacted and primarily features tweets from Trump in which he said there had been pervasive voter fraud in battleground states and called on state and election officials to address it. In tweets from November 2020, including on and around Election Day, Trump calls on the Supreme Court to decide the outcome or alleges that fraud in those battleground states is an “unsolvable problem.”
The records show how officials including Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt were forced to directly rebut Trump’s bunk claims online but often with demonstrably less effect on social media, given Trump’s reach on Twitter.
The tweets and retweets relate, in part, to Smith’s allegation that Trump was exacting a pressure campaign on election officials predicated on information he knew to be false and despite being told numerous times after Election Day that the election had been the most secure in history. Chris Krebs, former director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, made that announcement on Nov. 13. Former Attorney General William Barr would declare publicly on Dec. 1 that there was no evidence of voter fraud. None of that deterred Trump from pursuing his conspiracy theories, according to prosecutors.
This volume also shows tweets in which Trump calls on people to come to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, and not just the first time, Dec. 19, 2020, when he blasted out the invite to his “wild” rally.
Smith’s appendix shows Chutkan that Trump sent out the call multiple times in December, including on Dec. 30, when he wrote, “JANUARY SIXTH, SEE YOU IN DC!”
The appendix also shows that Dec. 30 post was retweeted by Trump’s official “Team Trump” campaign account. So were several others.
Volume III has sections from Pence’s book, “So Help Me God.” Prosecutors highlighted certain passages in which Pence’s describes trying to console a despondent Trump over his defeat and Pence’s own awareness at the time that if there had been any voter fraud, it wasn’t enough to cost Republicans the 2020 election.
Other sections feature Pence’s recollection of Trump’s repeated calls to him on the eve of the U.S. Capitol attack.
“You gotta be tough tomorrow,” Pence recalled Trump telling him.
There are transcripts from court hearings in the third appendix, including a portion of one that took place in Arizona’s Maricopa County, where Trump and his cohorts peddled a fake elector scheme. Other transcripts come straight from political speeches Trump gave, including one on Jan. 4, 2021, when he endorsed Republican Senators Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue before a Georgia runoff election. Trump spent much of that rally talking about his own reelection campaign and claiming the presidential vote had been rigged.
“And I hope Mike Pence comes through for us, I have to tell you,” Trump said in a stump speech in Georgia, adding that he liked Pence but that if he didn’t “come through for us,” he wouldn’t “like him quite as much.”
Trump would echo those remarks 48 hours later at his speech on the Ellipse.
Volume III also includes copies of electoral vote certificates that so-called Trump electors tried to pass off in Pennsylvania, Nevada, Michigan, Arizona and Georgia.
Other records released Friday show a budget and trip plan for Jan. 4 to Jan. 6, in which close to $3 million was allotted for events with right-wing groups including Turning Point Action, Tea Party Express and Save the U.S. Senate.
Volume IV contains information that is mostly already in the public record and was obtained through the House Jan. 6 committee. Much of this 384-page document is redacted and it doesn’t offer much new to pore over. There are letters and emails already on the record about the strategy to advance fake electors as well as Pence’s letter issued on Jan. 6, 2021, stating that he did not have unilateral authority to determine which electoral slates should be counted.
It also includes a transcript of a town hall from May 2023 in which Trump defended his remarks made at the rally on the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, and denied telling people to march to the Capitol that day.
The next big deadline Trump must meet in the election subversion case arrives Nov. 7, when he must reply to the 165-page immunity brief special counsel Jack Smith filed on Oct. 2. When he does, it is expected that Trump’s lawyers will emphasise that Trump genuinely believed there was widespread voter fraud and that he acted with the interest of the nation first to reverse his defeat.
Trump’s lawyers are also expected to push back on key distinctions Smith made around Trump as candidate for a new term in office versus Trump as commander-in-chief.
Smith’s immunity brief offered insight into Trump’s alleged conduct and frame of mind before and on Jan. 6, 2021, and included information on alleged efforts to advance fake electors in swing states that he lost to Joe Biden and pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results.
It pored over tweets, emails and testimony from dozens of Trump White House officials, insiders or allies to establish the contours of the sweeping conspiracy that culminated into a violent, armed and deadly attack on the U.S. Capitol. Importantly, the brief also addressed which of Trump’s acts were and were not “official,” according to Smith, under the Supreme Court’s recent presidential immunity decision.
The Supreme Court’s ruling granted presidents absolute immunity for their core acts and “presumptive” immunity for all other official acts. But actions outside of core acts are not given this protection.
It will be up to Chutkan to decide whether Smith’s interpretations and attempts to rebut the “presumptive” immunity standards can survive the standards the nation’s highest court has now set.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges he faces in the Jan. 6 case.
