Jack Smith exposed the insanity of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling

In this way, the letter is an unintended roadmap for how to wage a legally bulletproof insurrection. All Trump or a similarly minded future president would have to do is carry out his coup only through government officials and under the guise of supposedly “official” actions – such as the military – and he could not be prosecuted. As long as he hired his co-conspirators as official government employees, he would be willing.

Some of the strongest evidence in the letter focuses on the connections between Trump’s efforts to challenge the election despite overwhelming evidence that he lost and his threats against Mike Pence as Trump repeatedly tried to coerce his vice president not to play his official role and, in effect, block the transfer of power to a new president. But Smith is careful in his characterizations, distinguishing between Trump’s role as president and his role as a candidate: The letter argues that none of Trump’s attempts to pressure Pence should be viewed as “official” actions within the role, which goes to the president during elections; Instead, these were Trump’s campaign decisions as a private citizen.

The most shocking evidence, as many news outlets highlighted Wednesday, came in the connections between a series of Trump’s tweets, which Smith carefully demonstrates were “private” actions, and Trump’s orchestration of a pressure campaign against Pence, who disagreed to count. Trump threatened Pence that he would be hated by hundreds of thousands of people, then posted a tweet calling on them to protest at the U.S. Capitol. Finally, on January 6, when Pence had not given in to this pressure, Trump tweeted a message at 2:24 p.m. that essentially alerted the crowd to him – and then responded when an aide warned him of the danger in which Pence said, “So what?”