NEW Trump Indictment & Appeal EXPLAINED

daddy Jack Strikes Back daddy Jack Strikes Back special counsel Jack Smith who this channel lovingly refers to as Daddy Jack Smith has been busy y'all and because two separate things got filed in two separate cases this week I think it's easy to have gotten them both pretty confused both filings are related to and direct consequences of that batet presidential immunity case that the Supreme Court decided last month highly suggest checking out my video covering that case if you are not up to date so one of the filings is an appeal of the moral logo documents case which very shady District Court Judge Eileen Cannon threw out completely dismissed last month based on what Clarence Tomas wrote in his separate non-binding opinion in that presidential immunity case the other filing was a superseding indictment filed in the January 6th election obstruction case against Trump out of DC this was also in response to the presidential immunity Supreme Court ruling and Rewritten to basically try and get around that ruling but let's take each in turn shall we recently did my own color palette analysis and I think I'm probably a soft summer though if you're an expert please let me know so I decided to order my free warie Parker at home Tryon kit and specifically chose frames that fit the soft summer color palette what's cool about Warby Parker is they have a huge variety of frames to choose from and glasses start at just $95 including prescription lenses their at home try- on kit means I can try five different frames on for free at home and then ship them back with the included return shipping label super simple warie Parker has 190 retail locations as well and they offer eye exams contact lenses and sunglasses too tell me what you think about these this is the mateline wide in Orchid this is the Durand extra wide in rosewater these are the hasal wide in Crystal these are the hemings in vidiian and these are the Hughes wide in Pacific Crystal okay which ones should I get I've been 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for you page will know what I'm talking about but the girls who get it get it the girls who don't don't okay first the appeal on Monday daddy Jack Smith filed an appeal with the 11th circuit here's a quick simple breakdown CU our high schools do a Despicable job teaching us the basic functioning of our Judiciary there are two largely separate court systems each state has its own state court system and then the federal government has its own court system both of these cases are federal cases federal cases typically go through three levels the district court is the first court to hear the case and they do the routine hearings and briefings and scheduling and ultimately hear any trials if any happen each state has its own district court or is divided into multiple districts if there's lots of people in cases so Minnesota is all one single District the District of Minnesota but in New York there's the Southern District Eastern District Western District and Northern districts of New York so depends on the state but that's the lowest rung the next rung up on the federal ladder is the appeals court the united states is divided into 13 appet divisions and the numbers don't make a ton of sense but it's basically by region so like New York Vermont and Connecticut are in the second District Florida Alabama and Georgia are in the 11th California and pretty much all the western states are in the 9th Etc when a party wants to question a decision made by The District Court they appeal it up to the Circuit Court for whatever region they're in that appeal can happen after a trial has concluded but it also often happens in the middle of a case at the district court level so if the court makes a decision about something during the case a party can be like wait a minute and then they can appeal that decision up and then if a party doesn't like the decision of the Circuit Court the next rung up is the US Supreme Court which they can appeal to and then the Supreme Court gets to decide whether or not it will hear the appeal if they decide not to hear the appeal then whatever the appell at court decided stands Okay cool so there have been a number of appeals in this maralo case which typically haven't gone well for judge Eileen Cannon because she's got some pretty egregious biases in favor of trump and has made rulings that truly defy law and logic to try and delay the case as long as possible this also includes just dragging her feet on really basic decisions that needed to be made to just move the case forward the latest egregious decision she made is the subject of this appeal last month she threw out the case all together fully dismissed it gone dead her reason was based on a tiny nugget that Clarence Thomas gave her and Lord knows he did it knowingly and willfully because the man is insane but he's not an idiot and this is in his concurring opinion that he wrote along with the presidential immunity case last month and just so we're clear a concurring opinion gives a Justice a chance to say hey I agree with the others and here's also my personal reasoning for it and hey I would have gone even further a concurring opinion is not law it is not precedent it is a string that lawyers and judges can cling to so that later when they don't have case law or statutes on their side they can say hey here's a thing a Justice said once about this so why don't we run with it it in no way creates new law but Thomas knew that it would be enough and we all saw it for what it was at the time in my immunity video I said ien Canon is going to latch on to this and she did in truly spectacular fashion frankly like not even a whiff of like hey guys I know this isn't like established law or whatever but I think that there's a genuine question here no no I Canon said that with her whole chest okay so in the Supreme Court immunity case Clarence Thomas in his non-binding not new law concurring opinion wrote I am not sure that any office for the special counsel has been established by law as the Constitution requires just I'm not sure guys I don't know maybe something to look into and then gave a bunch of reasons which are the exact reasons Trump's lawyers latched on to then Eileen Cannon then ran with that when she agreed to dismiss the case the argument is basically procedural the special council's appointment process didn't follow the process required by the Constitution so the whole case needs to be thrown out because daddy jacksmith isn't constitutionally permitted to be bringing the case in the first place according to Thomas according to Thomas in order for a special councel to be legit Congress had to have created the Office of the special counsel by law first and then Congress had to have granted the Attorney General the right to appoint that special counsel first only then could the special Council exist and old Clarence in this specific opinion was very concerned about the overreaching of the president that our founding fathers in their infinite wisdom so feared n n the AG who is the head of the doj which is an executive branch agency and therefore under the president if he could willy-nilly appoint whatever special counsel he wanted by God we'd be going backwards to the time of kings and tyrants all of this in the same breath as concurring with the majority opinion that presidents can commit crimes as long as it's an official act it's baffling like they're not even trying to seem like they're following a logical pattern anymore anyway so then Trump's lawyers were like oh hey he's right and then filed a motion to dismiss the maral Lago documents case saying hey Daddy Jack Smith isn't even legit and Eileen Canon said hold my beer and wrote a 93-page ruling dismissing the whole case on basically the same argument as Clarence Thomas laid out and in fact citing to that Thomas opinion on three separate occasions it was a dismissal that according to former Attorney General Eric Holder was so bereft of legal reasoning as to be utterly absurd and so on Monday daddy Jack Smith filed his appeal with the 11th circuit laying out his arguments as to why her dismissal was so B of legal reasoning as to be utterly absurd it's 81 pages I read it so you don't have to but you still should if you want to I'll link it down below I think a huge point in this is that despite Clarence Thomas' concurring opinion there is established Supreme Court precedent allowing for a special councel ever heard a Watergate I made a whole video about it check it out after this but in USV Nixon the court said that Congress through four different statutes had vested in the Attorney General the power to appoint a special prosecutor that was the main decision you know the one that's actually binding precedent not the concurring opinion and to get around this Canyon was like oh that that wasn't binding that's just dicta a dicta a fun way to dismiss the things judges say one of the many Latin words that lawyers love to use dicta are the asides and throwaway sentences that judges include in their rulings that don't have anything to do with the outcome of the case they're just additional thoughts tangents hypotheticals context history background broader General statements or assumptions judges make that are not considered necessary to the decision at hand there are definitely parts of cases that are dicta that's true that you learn about that in year one of law school and that a judge would scoff at you for citing to as any sort of binding precedent in a case like if you cited to a case that held that an electric company was liable for a forest fire and the decision in the case offhandedly mentioned that brown bears tend to be brown and you use that case to support your argument that brown bears are legally Brown that's not the point of the case you're citing to that case didn't establish that they just said that offhandedly obviously that's an oversimplified example but you get the picture so Canon was like in the case about Nixon being held liable for Watergate where the court was like yeah this special Council Prosecuting this case was legit she said no no that's unpersuasive dicta has nothing to do with the case at hand and daddy Jack Smith argues this dismissal should be reversed on that ground alone because that's ridiculous but also a bunch of other reasons too and then he methodically goes through and points out every absolutely infuriating legal stretch that Canon made notice Congress has passed laws allowing the AG to appoint a special councel it empowers the AG to commission attorneys who are specially retained under authority of the Department of Justice as special assistance to the attorney general but Canon argued that the word appoint was missing from the law so therefore it clearly didn't Grant appointment Powers but the law says retain which clearly means the same thing and uses appoint interchangeably with retain and commission throughout the law he even goes so far as to explain the basics of grammar to e Canon because she also said that the statute says the attorneys must be specially retained which is past tense and therefore means that they can't be private attorneys they must already have been working for the doj before being appointed which Jack Smith was not but our good daddy Jack calls her Bluff and points out the absurdity of that interpretation first of all he says she misunderstands the statute's grammatical construction retained and appointed are past participles that take their tense from the surrounding present tense verbs and results in a nonsensical interpretation under an attorney must be hired and only then potentially minutes later could become specially retained as special counsel he says the Court's conclusion that accomplishing the appointment in a single step rather than two separate steps threatens the structural Liberty inherent in the separation of powers finds no support in text context history or common sense sick grammatical burn dude and over and over Smith points to statute after statute that clearly grants the AG the power to appoint a special counsel which can and tried to get around with obscure legal tactics stretching the definitions of words and Flatout ignoring precedent in history he's like here are the statutes which have very clear meanings and then she's just in the background doing cartwheels trying to make them say something different like the judicial gymnastics required to get around clear law and precedent in this case is baffling and even beyond that he says there is long established precedent for the appointment of special counsil since even before the existence of the doj he goes all the way back to the 1800s and breaks down all the ways that this is suppor reported by history and legal precedent he even slides in a quote from Good Old Justice Brett Kavanaugh himself who wrote in a law review article titled the president and the independent Council in 1998 that the appointment of special council is a deeply rooted tradition in the United States and you know conservative justices love deeply rooted Traditions I love like that you know that his team was just scouring like every possible source and someone Came Upon that and was like hell yeah let's slide that one in there it's not Bing president but it's a quote from someone who now sits on the highest court in the land and then finally he lays out why Canon's rationale if taken to its logical conclusion could jeopardize the long-standing operation of the justice department and call into question hundreds of appointments throughout the executive branch saying if the Attorney General lacks the power to appoint inferior officers that conclusion would invalidate the appointment of every member of the department who exercises significant Authority and occupies A continuing office other than the few that are specifically identified by Statute at a minimum that list includes high ranking Department positions such as the deputy solicitors General and the deputy assistant Attorneys General The District Court's rationale would likewise raise questions about hundreds of appointments throughout the executive branch including in the Departments of Defense State Treasury and labor the implausibility of that outcome underscores why the District Court's novel conclusions lack Merit daddy it is brilliantly written Daddy Jack Smith brought his aame to this one Trump's lawyers have 30 days to file their reply to his brief and then the circuit may hear oral arguments and the 11th circuit has SL slap down Canon's rulings in the past often with uncharacteristically harsh language for a circuit court so there is a chance that they'll do it again here now daddy Smith did not request that Canon be fully removed from the case and a new judge be assigned the appell court has the power to do that and could do it even if he doesn't ask for it and experts theorize though that he didn't ask for it either because if the 11th circuit throws this dismissal out that would give him a third example of her completely botching this case which he could then take and say hey look at this she needs to be removed or it could just be that removing a judge from the case case is really rare and could be seen as a political move and he just wants to win this case on the legal merits either way like I said Trump's lawyers have 30 days to file a response they'll likely use all 30 of those days as lawyers typically do then oral arguments will have to be scheduled like just getting this appeal through Court will likely take longer than we have before the election and if Trump wins in November he will be able to tell the doj to drop the case altogether if he doesn't win then it will continue on under the Harris presidency so please vote holy wow okay and then separately Daddy Jack Smith who is a busy busy man filed a superseding indictment in the January 6 criminal case against Trump accusing him of inciting a riot and interfering with the certification of the 2020 election what's a superseding indictment so an indictment is the official document a prosecutor files to start a criminal case against someone if he wants to change what's in that indictment based on new law or new evidence he can file a superseding indictment so now that new superseding indictment is controlling and the old indictment is thrown out why did daddy Jack Smith have to file the superseding indictment because last month the Supreme Court said presidents can commit crimes if they're official actions and also that anything that is an official action cannot be used as evidence against him either so anything that includes His official Communications with other people and His official acts during his time as president not only can he not be prosecuted for them they also can't support his prosecution in an unofficial capacity either so Smith had to go through and basically remove any defendants who are only culpable based on things that happened while Trump was in office and talking about official things and doing official things and he had to go through and clarify that the actions listed in the indictment that constitute a crime were not official acts but what are official acts who knows the Supreme Court was like we're not telling you got to figure it out and so this is a direct consequence of that Supreme Court ruling because now we're left with the pieces and have to figure out what the the law is now this is what happens when a rogue Supreme Court disregards precedent and establish law chaos so the new indictment Keeps The Four counts against him intact those are conspiracy to defraud the United States conspiracies to obstruct an official proceeding obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy against rights which means he tried to suppress someone's free exercise and enjoyment of a right given to them by the Constitution specifically in this case the right to vote and have one's vote counted against the American people you and me okay but the indictment goes on to rework some of the language alleging that Trump didn't have any constitutionally assigned presidential duties related to The Post elction transition of power there was nothing for him to officially be doing there that was outside the scope of His official duties and it cuts out language about Trump's interactions with Justice Department officials and instead relies more heavily on actions Trump took when Trump was acting as a candidate not as president one line that was added was the defendant had no official responsibilities related to the certification proceeding but he did have a personal interest as a candidate in being named the winner of the election they repeatedly refer to him as a candidate and not as president as much of his activity surrounding trying to overturn the election related to his personal interests as a candidate for president not in His official duties as acting president at the time it also clarifies over and over that the actions they're presenting were being done by his co-conspirators and individuals in their private capacity they were not acting as government officials now of course Trump for his part argues that any inquiry into the legitimacy of an election is fully within his scope of his official duties because he was just checking to make sure that our elections were secure again this is all in an effort to get around this new immunity ruling that itself is based on nothing so they're kind of just throwing spaghetti at the wall the goal of the indictment is to allege as many facts as possible that they think are provable Beyond A Reasonable Doubt so that they all add up to convince a jury that he's guilty of each crime and the language is important because if they alleg that he did something as president Trump that could come back and bite them now with the immunity ruling and again they were able to file this new indictment which was was approved by a whole new grand jury because of this new development in the law so this isn't a dead Witch Hunt As Trump proclaimed it to be on Truth social it is a routine thing that prosecutors do when new evidence is found or new laws established it just happens to be more consequential than any other prosecution ever because it's of a former potential future president typically Trump's lawyers would have to file an answer to the indictment but they already had scheduled for this Friday a joint resolution between Smith and Trump's attorneys to determine how this case would go forward and Trump continued to scream and cry on truth social saying he'd been informed by my attorneys that you're not even allowed to bring cases literally right before an election a direct assault on Democracy he's referring to an informal prosecution rule called the 60-day rule that says you can't take major action on a case like filing an indictment within 60 days of an election because prosecutors are banned by law from taking action with the intent to affect the outcomes of an election many legal Scholars are saying that this doesn't apply when the case is ongoing this has been going on for a long time this is just a new development in a longstanding case but even if it did apply the election is more than 60 days away and I'm sure it was on Smith's mind as he was determining timing of this because I'm certain that he's taking every precaution he can to be as apolitical as possible to uphold the Integrity of what he's doing so even if the 60-day rule doesn't apply here he's still following it by getting this superseding indictment in more than 60 days before the election for the record today is Wednesday August 28th we are 68 days away from the election so frankly this indictment was kind of a surprise because it came so so many days before the 60-day limmit and before any deadline for him to file it we love an efficient on top of it King so again the parties will confer Friday to determine how this case moves forward Trump has already pleaded not guilty to the charges and the special council's office has decided not to rearin him on this to make him come back into court so his not guilty pleadings continue to stand and we will see how this trial schedule will unfold given that the election is just a measly couple months away as we all know I'm sure his attorneys will drag their feet every step of the way and again if he wins in November he will just tell the doj to stop the prosecution so please vote are you registered to vote please go vote okay and just for a quick catch up on the other cases against Trump the hush money case where he was found guilty on 34 counts his lawyers requested the conviction be overturned because of the immunity ruling and sentencing be postponed until after the election the judge in that case will make a ruling on their request on September 16th and then there's also the state criminal case against him in Georgia for his role in allegedly trying to overturn his defeat in that state and it's a racketeering investigation that includes 13 criminal counts against him however the case has been gummed up because Trump's lawyers have moved to disqualify Georgia prosecutor Fanny Willis some people are saying fonnie Willis is it fonnie Willis because of a romantic relationship she had with a special prosecutor on the case and they also asked that she be removed because she has shown unfair racial animus towards Trump an appeals court will hear oral arguments on October 4th related to the Romantic relationship and having Willis removed from the case so again this case case is at a standstill because Trump's lawyers are using every tactic they can to delay for that one at least even if he is elected president he likely couldn't order the case to stop since it's a state case but it's obviously unprecedented for a sitting president to have a state criminal case pending against him so it's unclear how that one would unfold so please vote okay and breaking news leaving a comment is the best way to help this channel grow and it's free and easy to sound off but what other burning questions that you have or are you completely over Trump news at this point and want me to stop talking about him that's also Fair nothing else at least if you turn out to vote and he loses then we'd get to watch more of these criminal trials unfold against him which is really entertaining and I'd be so sad to miss out on that if he wins and also you know Fascism and project 2025 Etc so whatever your reason is please just vote okay thanks to my newest patrons special thanks to my Royal patrons and an extra special shout out to my multiplatinum patrons t l tranger Lucas Joshua Kohl's Thomas Johnson safia Sams Anthony Giles Taye and Brett Ponch your generosity makes this channel what it is so thank you if you'd like add free access to all these videos check out my patreon today and if you liked this video you'll also like my video all about the presidential immunity case thanks so much for watching have a good day bye-bye [Music]