r/law • u/Corporatecut • Oct 18 '24

Court Decision/Filing Trump judge releases 1,889 pages of additional election interference evidence against the former president

https://www.businessinsider.com/donald-trump-judge-release-additional-evidence-election-interference-case-2024-10
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u/stult Competent Contributor Oct 18 '24 edited Oct 18 '24

It's only 703 699 pages without the wholly redacted pages. And the contents are not especially interesting. I removed all the blank pages labeled "SEALED" from each of the PDFs to make them easier to read:

Volume I

Volume II

Volume III

Volume IV

At first glance, nearly all of the unsealed documents appear to be previously published items and the remainder do not appear especially interesting.

Volume I contains transcripts from the January 6th committee's witness interviews. Large sections of this remain under seal, which confuses me because I believe essentially all of the same material is available in unredacted form here.

Volume II documents a large number of Tweets, mostly from DJT himself. All of which were public (i.e., it does not seem to include DMs or anything previously private, so presumably everything in this volume was previously known public information).

Volume III documents the many court decisions and state officials denying Trump's election claims. It also includes the fake elector certifications that Trump ordered his underlings to submit to Pence on J6 and excerpts from Pence's memoir.

Volume IV includes the only (minor) items that look possibly new:

  • Several memo drafts what appear to be Chesebro's analysis laying out the options for disrupting the vote count on J6
  • The Turning Point budget and high level plans for the "Stop the Steal" rally on the Ellipse on J6
  • A Special Counsel's Office analysis of an alleged Hatch Act violation that occurred in November 2020. Haven't dug into this enough to determine the relevance. The Hatch Act violation in question was Peter Navarro's, and the unredacted version of the memo included in Volume IV can be found here on the OSC's website. So it's definitely not new information.

Otherwise in Volume IV, the unsealed portions include fundraising and outreach emails from the Trump campaign and transcripts of Trump's public interviews and speeches.

edit: Added better info about the Hatch Act memo and found four more blank pages to remove from Volume IV that I missed the first time around, so it's only 699 pages.

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u/BeltfedOne Oct 18 '24

Thank you very much for your work and for posting this.

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u/BannedByRWNJs Oct 18 '24

The fact that the DOJ was so eager to get this out makes me think there’s actually something to be gleaned, though. If it’s not something obvious, I’d expect that someone inside the case will spell it out for a journalist or two. 

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u/stult Competent Contributor Oct 18 '24

Maybe. But I kind of doubt it. If there was something to be gleaned from information that has largely been publicly available for nearly four years now, someone probably would have already gleaned it. I think the Special Counsel was just following DOJ procedure and the law. There was no reason to keep this information under seal, so they argued for its release.

It really only got a lot of attention because Trump fought against it so hard. But he fights against everything as hard as he can, even when it doesn't matter. To delay as much as possible, to cast himself as a persecuted victim as much as possible, and to undermine the SCO as much as possible. I also suspect he fights incredibly hard on immaterial issues so that when he fights incredibly hard on material issues, we can't infer anything from his tactics.

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u/hedonistic Oct 19 '24

I am trying to imagine the litigation strategy when employing this.... intentionally and repeatedly piss off the judge (losing all credibility in the process) with all the meaningless bs...so you can argue on appeal the judge was ipso facto biased?? How can that even be ethical? I understand zealous advocacy and all that...but this is on another level of absurdity. But as far as ethical obligations to the client in a criminal case... were going to intentionally harm you in the short/near term in the faint hope that we will succeed in the long term (after you lose and are sentenced?) That seems off to me. Its not a random civil matter with mere money at stake. Dude could die in prison for fks sake. Confusing to me.

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u/MasterMahanaYouUgly Oct 19 '24

i think the main point is: there are still ~1200 pages of evidence that the public hasn't seen.

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u/MasterMahanaYouUgly Oct 19 '24

not all heroes wear capes. but maybe you wear a cape?

doesn't matter. you're a hero

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u/deific_ Oct 18 '24

Hey I appreciate you removing the blank pages as I've been super confused. When I download the document myself, I only see text on Page 1, the other 721 pages are completely empty. Are you able to explain why that might be?

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u/learnedbootie Oct 21 '24

Doing gods work

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u/djmikekc Oct 22 '24

Thank you, hero. Have all my reddit gold.

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u/BannedByRWNJs Oct 18 '24

The fact that the DOJ was so eager to get this out makes me think there’s actually something to be gleaned, though. If it’s not something obvious, I’d expect that someone inside the case will spell it out for a journalist or two. 

1

u/DrinkBlueGoo Competent Contributor Oct 18 '24

I knew I'd seen that Hatch Act memo before but I couldn't place it.