Donald Trump is in serious legal trouble. You’ve been hearing that phrase for quite some time, but this time, he knows it. And the thing is, you can tell by his own behavior.

Trump’s disturbing social media breakdown today on his platform Truth Social leaves absolutely nothing to the imagination. He’s no longer even arguing that he’s innocent. He’s mad about the timing of the latest release from Special Prosecutor Jack Smith.

That’s because this one is a doozy, contains all new evidence, and completely avoids the immunity that his Federalist Society hand-picked Supreme Court majority gave him recently.

That decision, arrived at by the 6–3 conservative majority, held that Trump was immune from prosecution for anything he did in service of his job as the President of the United States. But the ruling didn’t cover anything he did as a candidate for the office, even if he happened to hold the office at the same time.

The new release is heavily redacted, but only with names. And internet sleuths quickly sorted out exactly who was being talked about pretty easily.

Most importantly, the entire new indictment that Smith filed back in August took the place of the old one that listed “the Defendant” as the president and re-named him as a candidate.

And the damning thing for Trump, the reason that he can no longer complain about the content of the evidence, is that he can’t call it a witch hunt anymore. All of the evidence in the new 165-page brief Smith just released is from Republicans.

People who worked for and with Trump.

Now all the standard TV talking heads that regularly side with the convicted felon have been filled in on the new Trump talking point: It’s now about the timing. This HAS to be election interference, right?

So Jonathan Turley and Elie Honig and even Judge Jeanine Pirro are all on television, breathlessly gasping that there’s no reason for this to be happening right now, it just has to be Democrats tampering with the election so that Trump will lose.

Guess what, guys: It IS so Trump will lose. The very talented prosecutor in this case — you know, that guy who gets convictions in The Hague for human rights violations — knows that if Trump wins the election, he’ll get himself off the hook.

That is a perfectly fine and adequate reason to do this right now.

You sure wouldn’t know it from Trump’s Truth Social, though. He’s retweeting them like mad.

2:51 PM:
“Jonathan Turley: “Smith was clearly eager to get this out before the public despite Justice Department policies that encourage prosecutors to avoid acts that would be viewed as trying to influence an election. He is trying to thread the needle in this filing to get around the Supreme Court immunity decision…The new case is to indictments what shrinkflation is to products — same package just less content. Smith knows that he has a motivated and supportive judge and wants to simply prove the same basic claims on less evidence.”

You’re almost getting it, Jonathan. Also, I don’t think the DoJ came up with those unwritten rules about filing too close to an election with the idea in mind that there might be a convicted felon on the ticket who will use the justice system, once it’s under his control, to absolve himself of crimes.

What Turley calls “less evidence” in this filing is, in fact, plenty of evidence. It’s just shorter because it’s all the evidence he needs, and nothing extraneous that could give the Supreme Court reason to take it up again.

Zero seconds, later, because he already had it ready to tweet, 2:51 PM:

“Gregg Jarrett: “Releasing this motion, this court filing, it sure looks like blatant Election Interference…There’s no good reason to make it public. It’s premature. There isn’t even a trial date. So, I think this was done knowing full well Media and Democrats would seize on ‘provocative’ details, publicize it, to affect voters…At times it reads like bad detective fiction. A lot of it is irrelevant and inadmissible conversations that other people have that are not connected to Trump directly. So, it seems like deliberate Election Interference…The problem for Smith is a lot of his evidence and testimony comes from Public Officials, and their conversations with Trump, including the Vice President. Under the Supreme Court Decision that may well be protected information, and thus inadmissible.”

And the problem for Gregg Jarrett’s argument is that those conversations would be protected if they were between the president acting within his duties and other public officials. But these are conversations between Donald Trump, candidate for the 2020 election, and other public officials.

Inexplicably, it takes Trump 9 minutes to post the rest of Jarrett’s thoughts, at 3:00 PM:

“….I’m going to hand this one over to one of DOJ’s most esteemed alums, who explained it this way to the Justice Department’s internal watchdog: ‘To me if it [an election] were 90 days off, and you think it has a significant chance of impacting an election, unless there’s a reason you need to take that action now, you don’t do it.’ Those words were spoken by Sally Yates — former deputy attorney general, venerated career prosecutor, no fan of Trump (who unceremoniously fired her in 2017), and liberal folk hero. As usual, Yates is spot on. And her explanation conveys this indelible truth: If prosecutors bend their principles depending on the identity of their prey, then they’ve got no principles at all.”

Maybe Trump took so long because he was mulling over whether this part would make him look stupid. DING DING DING, Donnie. It certainly does. Because Sally’s right — if, say, Hillary Clinton were accused of something totally unrelated to the subversion of democracy, and say, James Comey announced 11 days before the 2016 election that they’d “found some new emails” that had nothing to do with the election… Oh, wait. That’s exactly what happened. And there was no chance she could have gotten herself out of trouble even if she’d won, because there was no “presidential immunity” back then, and those emails were from a candidate, not a president.

To be clear, there IS “a reason you need to take that action now,” Gregg.

“You don’t have to release this before the Election.” – Jonathan Turley

“There’s no legal need for it.” – Andrew McCarthy

Trump’s social media meltdown proves that, just like in every legal case, he eventually stops arguing that he’s innocent, and instead claims he either had a right to break the law, or that there’s no reason to bring it up. Sometimes both.