INDICTMENT 2.0: The office of Special Counsel Jack Smith issued a new indictment of Donald Trump in the election interference case paring away charges and actions that might have been covered by the Supreme Court’s decision that gave a president broad immunity from prosecution.

  Much of the original indictment survives, including that Trump is accused of conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct the certification of the election on January 6th, 2021, and to deprive millions of Americans of their rights to have their votes counted.

  From the start the indictment refers to Trump as a candidate for president, rather than president, signaling that he’s being charged a private party. The indictment was filed shortly in advance of the Justice Department’s unwritten “60 day rule” intended to avoid actions taken too close to an election. 

  Significantly, the new indictment does not include charges related to Trump’s effort to get the Justice Department involved with reversing the results of the 2020 election. The Supreme Court had ruled that dealing with the Justice Department was part of Trump’s “core” duties as president and, regardless of possible criminality, is immune from prosecution.

ORANGE ALERT!: After expressing doubts about whether he would debate Kamala Harris, Donald Trump announced that he’ll go ahead with it … and made his announcement with his usual class.

  Trump posted on his Truth Social website that, “I have reached an agreement with the Radical Left Democrats for a Debate with Comrade Kamala Harris.” 

  It’s scheduled for September 10th in Philadelphia.

THE SITDOWN: Vice President Kamala Harris and running mate Tim Walz have agreed to do their first sit-down interview as candidates tomorrow night at 9 on CNN. Donald Trump has been claiming Harris isn’t smart enough to handle a live interview.

  The real Clear Politics average of polls has Harris up again by .2 over Donald Trump, now with a lead of 1.7 percent.

IT’S POLITICAL: Donald Trump says he will name former independent presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and former Democrat Tulsi Gabbard as honorary co-chairs of a presidential transition team, The NY Times reports.

  The transition team helps develop policy and find people to appoint to administrative posts. Kennedy was a lifelong progressive Democrat before abandoning the party to run for president and Gabbard left the Democrats after a failed run for president in 2020. 

  Several Democratic organizations with backing from the Kamala Harris campaign this week sued the Georgia state election board claiming that new rules approved by the board that would alter and possibly delay the election certification process are illegal and could create chaos. 

  The lawsuit says that the board intends to give local election officials broad license to “hunt for purported election irregularities of any kind, potentially delaying certification and displacing longstanding (and court-supervised) processes for addressing fraud.”

  The Georgia Election Board was recently taken over by a 3-2 majority of conservative activists. They voted to give election officials authority to conduct “reasonable inquiry” into elections before certification and to require that county election officials be given “all election related documentation” before certification. The lawsuit argues that those rules give the false impression that election official have discretion over whether to certify the vote. 

  The lawsuit argues that, “These novel requirements introduce substantial uncertainty in the postelection process and — if interpreted as their drafters have suggested — invite chaos by establishing new processes at odds with existing statutory duties.” 

THE WAR ROOM: Israeli special forces clearing a tunnel in Gaza accidentally came across a 52-year-old Israeli Arab hostage who had been left alone in a subterranean room. Farhan al-Qadi, 52, a member of the country’s Bedouin Arab minority, is only the eighth hostage to be rescued alive since Hamas militants took roughly 250 hostages last October.

  The rescue occurred during Israeli strikes that killed at least 20 people. The death toll in Gaza is now over 40,000.

  Al-Qadi was taken to a hospital and was in “stable medical condition,” despite having lost a lot of weight, the military said.

  As many as 100 hostages are still being held, although Israel believes that about 30 of them are dead. The rescue comes as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is under increasing pressure to reach a deal with Hamas for release of the hostages.

  On another front, at least nine people were killed today in Israeli raids on targets in the West Bank.

THE SPIN RACK: A West Virginia eighth grade football player died of a head injury sustained in practice last Friday. He’s the third school-age football player to die this month. — Customs officers in California found $5 million worth of methamphetamine packaged to look like watermelons. — Travis Kelce, the Super Bowl Champion with the Kansas City Chiefs and boyfriend of Taylor Swift, and his brother Jason, retired from the Philadelphia Eagles, have signed a $100 million podcast deal. 

BELOW THE FOLD: When you run for office, the bodies come out of their graves. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. admitted that he once had a parasitic worm in his brain and that he had planted the body of a bear cub in New York’s Central Park.

  Now comes the revival of a story that Kennedy once cut the head off a dead whale with a chainsaw in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts and took it home to New York on top of the family mini-van. He has been said to enjoy examining dead animals.

  Back in 2012, Kathleen “Kick” Kennedy, the former candidate’s daughter, told Town & Country magazine that “Every time we accelerated on the highway, whale juice would pour into the windows of the car, and it was the rankest thing on the planet.”

  She went on, “We all had plastic bags over our heads with mouth holes cut out, and people on the highway were giving us the finger, but that was just normal day-to-day stuff for us.” 

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