The following is a lightly-edited transcript of the September 27, 2024 episode of The Daily Blast podcast. To listen to it, click here.This is the Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.Greg Sargent: Donald Trump has been pretty quiet about January 6 lately, but out of nowhere he suddenly erupted at special counsel Jack Smith, unleashing an epic rant on social media about supposed new revelations that the deep state deliberately allowed the violent insurrection to go forward against his will. We don’t think it’s a coincidence that Trump is exploding like this, because Jack Smith is submitting a court filing as we speak detailing his full case against Trump’s alleged January 6 related crimes. Depending on how that goes, the public could learn a lot of new information about what Trump did that day and in the run-up to it. Today, we’re talking about all this with Politico reporter Kyle Cheney, who to our mind is one of the best chroniclers of the legal machinations around January 6 out there. Really glad to have you on, Kyle.Kyle Cheney: Good to be with you, and thank you. That was very kind.Sargent: Trump’s latest claim on Truth Social is that House Republicans have uncovered smoking-gun proof that Trump actually did call for 10,000 National Guard troops to come to the Capitol that day and that deep-state subversives disregarded that order. Trump said this proves he did nothing wrong. Now, the January 6 committee completely debunked the idea that Trump called in troops. We saw that in the report. Can you walk us through what this new House GOP finding is supposed to be and what the reality is? Cheney: The rhetoric from Trump is an escalation of claims he’s been making for forever that are just not based in reality. First of all, to my understanding, there aren’t even 10,000 National Guard troops available in Washington, DC. That’s the first giveaway that that was never a serious offer. And it wasn’t even an offer. As you pointed out, the January 6 committee has debunked that, using Trump’s own aides to say there was never an actual offer. I think what we’ve seen House Republicans do is get at this idea that Trump supposedly wanted more law enforcement, more security presence in Washington that day, and that the testimony they’ve got from members of the National Guard, leaders of the Pentagon somehow lend support to this idea that Trump wanted more security and therefore, how could he have wanted what happened to happen at the Capitol? There’s an argument for that, but if you actually look at the totality of evidence, what Trump wanted was his people to be protected from antifa. It’s pretty clear when you look at the sum total of evidence, they were always talking about our people, protect our people from whatever the left is going to throw at them on January 6. It was never about protecting the Capitol. Sargent: Right. It also bears mentioning that none of what Trump or House Republicans are saying now cancels what has been documented about January 6 anyway, which is incredibly damning both in terms of what he did while the violence raged, like point the mob right at his vice president, and what he did in the run-up to it, which showed a multilayered plot to subvert our institutions at every turn. As you said, and I really think this is worth underscoring, much of what was documented about Trump’s own conduct was done with the help of his own aides and advisors who showed extraordinary courage in detailing it, at least some of them did, and have paid a major price for it. Cheney: It’s true, and even the House Republicans who are now reinvestigating this in an attempt to undermine it, what they found… I reviewed some of the transcripts of the National Guardsmen, and leaders who testified, and they said, Had Trump been alarmed enough to call down to DC National Guard headquarters, he might have been able to cut through some red tape to get the guard to the Capitol faster. That’s a big point of contention. The people of the Pentagon said, No, no, no, we had all the authority we needed. But what these guard leaders said was, If you get a call from the president and he says stop the hand-wringing, get people to the Capitol now, it would have happened and it might have happened immediately. Trump never made that call that day. Sargent: He certainly did not. Some of the evidence that’s come out that the January 6 committee documented was that whatever he said was so convoluted and vague and almost meaningless that it just doesn’t come close to showing what he says and shows. Jack Smith just submitted a new dossier to the court, laying out the evidence that he and his prosecutors have of Trump’s criminality. We should remind people that the trial won’t take place until after the election, but you reported in your piece today that this dossier is expected to contain a lot of new information. Before we get to those details about what might be in there, what’s the basic purpose of this move right now by Jack Smith?Cheney: You’re going to hear a lot of complaining that this is Jack Smith trying to influence the election. This was really made necessary, in a sense, by the Supreme Court putting this case on hold for eight months. The ruling that they issued on presidential immunity, which forced Jack Smith to go back to the drawing board for how he was going to craft and frame his case against Trump, created this process. What happened is the Supreme Court said, The judge in your trial, Tanya Chutkan, has to decide whether any of the conduct, any evidence Jack Smith wants to use against you is protected by presidential immunity. Smith said, Let me file all my evidence and show it to you, Judge Chutkan, and you can decide whether it’s subject to presidential immunity or not. And Trump’s attorney said, Well, hold on, if you’re going to start dumping your evidence on the public docket, that’s a month before the election, this is election interference. The judge said, From the beginning, I’ve said I’m not thinking about the election calendar. She also hasn’t said she’s going to make it public, which is the biggest question at the moment. But she has said she will receive Jack Smith’s brief and review it and decide eventually what, if any of it, will become public. Sargent: Let me ask you, though. It’s reasonable to assume that at least some of it will become public, right? Judge Chutkan is someone who seems willing to push the envelope and doesn’t really get pushed around too easily. I’ve got to think there’s a strong public interest here in Americans learning at least some of this stuff, right? Cheney: Yes. Judge Chutkan, maybe above any other judge involved in this process, has cited the public interest in these proceedings to justify scheduling the trial for what she initially did back in March and keeping things moving along. Even her ruling on presidential immunity, which was overturned by the Supreme Court, cited the immense public interest in accountability for these alleged crimes. Some of the information Jack Smith submitted presumably would not be covered by some of the confidentiality rules governing the case, the grand jury secrecy rules, and could be made public. But he has signaled himself that a lot of it would be in those sensitive categories that Chutkan may have a decision to make about. Sargent: I think a lot of people believe that we know everything there is to know about Trump and January 6. But that’s really not true. To remind people, some of his advisors, the less heroic ones, like Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and social media guru Dan Scavino, defied January 6 Committee subpoenas. As a result, we have an incomplete picture of his conduct on that day. This could be extremely damning, couldn’t it? Because while we know that he sat around and watched the violence on television and seemed to enjoy it, and refused desperate and frantic entreaties including from Republicans to call off the rioters, he very well might have said things that we don’t know about. Jack Smith probably has some of the stuff, right? What do you anticipate? Cheney: That’s my view of this. There were moments in the January 6 committee interviews with important people like White House lawyer Pat Cipollone, or, like you said, people they never got to like Dan Scavino who, I don’t know what they actually said to Jack Smith, but they cited privileges or refused to come in at all. Jack Smith, we know, overcame those privileges in secretive court battles with some of these same witnesses and he won those. So they had to testify about their conversations with Donald Trump, their interactions with him that would otherwise have been shielded. Pat Cipollone’s interview with the January 6 committee was very explosive, but he stopped at certain points that I can’t get into because that’s privilege, and they agreed with him to not push that envelope as a condition of his willingness to come in. Jack Smith certainly got past the committee and into areas that are probably the most sensitive and potentially explosive. Sargent: I will say that I have interviewed Tom Joscelyn, who was one of the January 6 committee’s top investigators. He dug extraordinarily deeply into it. He wrote a lot of the January 6 committee report, apparently, and he has said, straight up, there were things we could not learn that we wanted to know.Cheney: Just to throw a couple examples out: when Donald Trump tweeted at Mike Pence during the riot. Pence is in the process of being evacuated from the mob and came within about 100 feet of the rioters, Trump is tweeting an attack on him. It’s very famous now, obviously. He said, Pence didn’t have the courage to do what I wanted him to do and overturn the election. The details behind that tweet: who was with him when he crafted it? Did he craft it by himself? Was he the one who hit the send button? And were people around him telling him not to do that? Those details may come out in this kind of filing. Not to mention, Jack Smith got a search warrant to get all of Trump’s Twitter data about where he was when he sent things during the riot. Those details could be in a filing like this too.
https://newrepublic.com/article/186437/transcript-trumps-angry-eruption-jack-smith-reveals-deeper-fear