Judge Tanya Chutkan’s decision on whether to release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s immunity opus — which likely paints a damning portrait of President Trump — could be an October surprise that affects whether he regains the White House.

Mr. Smith on Thursday filed what he acknowledges is an “oversized” document that could run to more than 200 pages, more than quadruple the customary limit. Trump calls the brief a “monstrosity” and a “false hit job” whose mere existence violates his due process rights and presumption of innocence. It is the distillation of two years of work from Mr. Smith and his office. 

The special counsel’s motion is under seal, but Judge Chutkan on Friday announced that Trump has until October 1 to challenge any of Mr. Smith’s proposed redactions to the text. The 45th president will have until October 10 to challenge any redactions in the appendix to Mr. Smith’s filing, which the prosecutor has hyped as voluminous. The decision on how much of the book-length brief to release to the public is Judge Chutkan’s to make.

The jurist now has two editions of Mr. Smith’s brief. The first is unredacted, and the second is marbled with what the special counsel suggests be omitted from the version released to the public. He explains that his redactions aim to “protect Sensitive Materials and the witnesses … and allow an appropriate degree of public access.” 

Mr. Smith explains that he does not propose that Vice President Pence’s name be omitted because it already appears in the indictment. The special counsel notes that he “has not redacted quotations or summaries of information from Sensitive Materials,” which could include detailed accounts of Trump’s efforts to undo the results of the last presidential election. 

Mr. Smith acknowledges that blocking the release of some names of witnesses “may implicate a qualified First Amendment right to public access,” but counsels Judge Chutkan that the harm that could result from their disclosure outweighs the public’s right to transparency in the case. Last year she ventured, with regard to whether the case could interfere with the election, that “existence of a political campaign is not going to have any bearing on my decision.” 

The special counsel’s motion argues that Trump’s “conduct in the course of the charged crimes is not subject to immunity,” even after the Supreme Court in Trump v. United States ruled that all official presidential acts are presumptively immune. A smaller subset of presidential activities is entitled to “absolute” immunity, and unofficial ones enjoy no protection whatsoever.

The Nine returned the case to Judge Chutkan for proceedings to determine which acts alleged by Mr. Smith are immune and which are not. He persuaded her that a comprehensive brief of the kind he filed on Thursday was the most expeditious way to conduct that inquiry. Trump objected strenuously, and she reprimanded his attorneys for the “incoherence” of their position, explaining that the exchange of briefs is “simply how litigation works.”

Those sharp words are not the first ones Judge Chutkan has had for the 45th president — and his political supporters. In the January 6 case, she has ruled almost universally against Trump. Even before she was assigned Mr. Smith’s election interference case, she presided over a slew of January 6 prosecutions, and was known to dispense stiff sentences. The Obama-appointed judge called the riot “close to as serious a crisis as this nation has ever faced” and warned that “it can happen again. Extremism is alive and well in this country. Threats of violence continue unabated.”

Judge Chutkan, before the election subversion case, ruled against Trump in his efforts to invoke executive privilege to withhold documents from the House January 6 Committee. In that holding, she warned him, “Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President.” She discerned that President Biden’s waiver of privilege was more decisive than the objections of his predecessor.   

The judge ruled against Trump on immunity, as did the the District of Columbia Circuit of the United States Court of Appeals. Both were overruled by the justices. Judge Chutkan, in finding that Trump possessed no protection, wrote that his “four-year service as commander in chief did not bestow on him the divine right of kings to evade the criminal accountability that governs his fellow citizens.”

Trump, armed with immunity, will not face a jury before November’s vote. Yet the October 1 deadline for Trump to respond sets up, if Judge Chutkan continues to march in concert with the special counsel, the public release of Mr. Smith’s opus with weeks or days to go before Election Day. Could this document, likely filled with denunciations of Trump as a threat to democracy, be a so-called October surprise that redounds to the benefit of Vice President Harris? 

Trump’s attorneys warn Judge Chutkan against a “public release” of Mr. Smith’s immunity treatise so soon before the election. They contend that it violates the Department of Justice’s own guidelines against election interference. If Judge Chutkan’s schedule holds, though, the prosecutor’s masterpiece could soon appear in the court of public opinion.