Bill Press: The October surprise that should decide this election

It probably didn’t change that many votes, but this week’s vice presidential debate offered an interesting contrast. If slick, smooth, and slippery counts over wobbly, J.D. Vance won. If truth and common sense count over total baseless assertions (Wait? Donald Trump SAVED Obamacare?), Tim Walz won.

It's just too bad CBS News didn’t schedule the debate one day later, after the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s bombshell report on the crimes committed by Donald Trump around Jan. 6. Had they done so, that debate and this election would suddenly be over. Or should be.

On Wednesday, Oct. 2, Judge Tanya S. Chutkan of the Federal District Court in Washington released a 165-page brief filed by Smith which shows in great detail how Donald Trump conspired to overthrow the results of the 2020 election, acting in his own capacity as a candidate, not as president – and for which he must be held criminally responsible.

Smith’s filing, of course, is in response to the Supreme Court’s hyper-partisan 6-3 ruling on July 1, requiring the lower court to decide which actions by a president might be immune from prosecution and which ones not. Refusing to accept the results of an election and attempting to undo it, Smith argues, clearly are not.

“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,” Smith writes at the top of his brief. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”

We’ve seen much of the evidence in Smith’s brief before – much of it mirrors the final report of the Special House Committee on Jan. 6– but there’s also a lot of new stuff. Never has Trump’s role to overturn the election – before, during, and after January 6 – been so clearly laid out.

At the White House on Jan. 6, when an aide told him that Vice President Mike Pence’s life was in danger at the Capitol, Trump replied: “So what?” In an Oval Office meeting, when one of his lawyers told him his claims of widespread voter fraud would not hold up in court, Trump fired back: “The details don’t matter.” On Air Force One after the election, Trump was heard telling members of his family: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

For the first time, Smith details nine different post-election meetings or phone calls Pence had with Trump in which the vice president informed Trump there was no evidence of massive fraud and urged him to accept reality. He encouraged Trump “not to look at the election as a loss – just an intermission.” To which Trump replied: “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”

Smith goes on to chronicle everything Trump did to undermine the election and our democracy: claiming ahead of time the election was rigged; refusing to say he’d accept the outcome of the election; declaring he’d won before the votes were counted; falsely claiming massive fraud; calling up state election officials and strong-arming them to falsify vote totals; sending his goon squad of lawyers out to file (and lose) some 60 lawsuits alleging voter fraud; and pressuring his vice president to reject the Electoral College count submitted and certified by all 50 states.

All of which culminated in Trump’s summoning his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, speaking at a campaign rally and urging the armed mob to march on the Capitol, then standing by and doing nothing while they stormed the Capitol and sent lawmakers running for their lives.

Trump took none of those actions in his capacity as president, Smith reminds us. It was all the work of a losing candidate, acting purely in his own interest, willing to do anything, even break the law, to cling to the presidency. “At its core,” Smith concludes, “the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort. In his capacity as a candidate he used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”

And that should settle it once and for all. No other issue matters. Donald Trump committed treason. He used the powers of the presidency to try to overturn an election and destroy our democracy. That alone should disqualify him from ever running for office again. He should be in jail. The fact that so many Americans still support him is a stain on the soul of this nation.

(Bill Press is host of The BillPressPod, and author of 10 books, including: “From the Left: My Life in the Crossfire.” His email address is: bill@billpress.com. Readers may also follow him on Twitter @billpresspod.)