Jack Smith’s brief partially unsealed

Sounds like there could be quite a few tasty nuggets in there:

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.”

Extreme Hannibal Lecter voice: “Not anymore.”

Lede of Factual Proffer makes for some fine reading:

When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”). His effortsincluded lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R.Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud. They used these lies in furtherance of three conspiracies: 1) a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); 2) a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and 3) a conspiracy against millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.