Politico loves the smell of Lawfare in the morning.
The Playbook team of Eugene Daniels and Rachael "Impeachmas" Bade was so excited about this newly unsealed Jack Smith filing designed to harm Donald Trump that they blatantly declared that this Smith filing was "The first October surprise of 2024."
Let us now join Daniels and Bade gleefully delighting in Smith's "mountain of evidence" against Trump.
THE UNTOLD SECRETS OF JAN. 6 — It looks like we have October Surprise No. 1, courtesy of a man you may have forgotten about: special counsel JACK SMITH.
Yesterday, in an unsealed legal filing, Smith gave his most complete look yet at the mountain of evidence he’s amassed against Trump in the case laying out his attempts to overturn the 2020 election.
In recent American history, there are probably few moments that have been more scrutinized than the months leading up to Jan. 6, 2021, and yet the filing’s 165 pages were filled with new details and anecdotes. (That’s in part because Smith, unlike other investigators, spent more than a year knocking down Trump’s immunity claims and following lines of inquiry that none of the other investigations were able to.)
Did Smith's filing very conveniently overlook the transcripts released on September 20 by the Committee on Administration that President Donald Trump told Mark Milley on January 3, 2021 to use the National Guard or regular army soldiers to ensure the Capitol would be safe on January 6 of that year? Probably not since that would serve to ruin the narrative presented by the very political Jack Smith hyped by his Politico acolytes.
Daniels and Bade also reviewed the downbeat legal angle followed by their upbeat hopeful blatant political angle.
— The legal angle: If it wasn’t already clear, there’s no way this case is going to trial this year. Trump’s lawyers don’t even want to respond to Smith’s claims in court until late November, Josh reported last night — three weeks after the election. And if Trump wins, well, that’s lights out for Smith.
— The political angle: While Trump’s trials were helpful in coalescing the Republican Party around him during the GOP primary, it’s much more complicated for the general election, where both Trump’s legal imbroglios and attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election are not viewed favorably by the voters who are likely to prove decisive.
Daniels and Bade conclude that while it would be unseemly for the Harris campaign, at least in public, to comment on the Smith filing, Harris surrogates and other Democrats could go full October Surprise politics to hype it. Remember, officially there is nothing at all political about Jack Smith's October surprise despite Politico pretty much announcing that it is absolutely political and loving every anti-Trump tidbit.
But much will depend on how the Harris campaign and Democrats actually use what’s in the filing to drive home their points about Trump’s return to the White House. So far, the campaign has been mum.
When President JOE BIDEN was at the top of the ticket, he was always extremely careful to not comment on ongoing cases so as not to be credibly accused of putting his finger on the scale.
Harris is expected to handle it the same way, aides tell Playbook. While she has repeatedly brought up Trump’s criminal indictments on the campaign trail, it’s exclusively on the 37 counts on which he was actually found guilty in court. We wouldn’t expect that to change in the next month.
But, that’s not going to stop other Democrats and Harris surrogates from using the filing as a reminder of the messiness and chaos of the Trump years.
Thank you for that helpful suggestion, Politico, for those outside the Harris campaign to go full bore on hyping Smith's utterly political "October Surprise" filing.
