Trump's attorneys tried mightily to prevent the release of the indictment documents by Judge Chutkan, but she released them today. That genie is out of the bottle, even if through various appeals the Supreme Court eventually were to declare them off-limits.

Of course they were released before the election, how else can the electorate know the legal standing and dubious status of the candidate who is running in order to try to shut down all of the criminal trials. The public has a right to know.

Key takeaways from special counsel Jack Smith's major filing in Trump's 2020 election case

The 165-page document is available for anyone to read, and the political pundits are racing through the chapters like a tag team so they can report back to online hosts quickly. One of the first read out on MSNBC this afternoon had to do with pages deep in the document, testimony of a White House aid hurrying into the dining room on January 6, 2021 to tell Trump that Pence has been moved to a more secure location. Trump's response was along the lines of "so what?"

The cases and the election are separate threads here, but they do overlap on occasion, such as when the behavior was so bad on January 6 that the electorate need to know in order to make an informed decision. Anything more about this will go in the trials thread.