While the myriad legal fights that were projected to be the wrench in Trump’s reelection plans haven’t been as damaging as expected for him, New York City Mayor Eric Adams is feeling some of Trump’s pain. The embattled mayor hasn’t had a smooth year, and his recent indictment following a yearlong investigation into his office is making matters worse. 

A year ago, the two men appearing as allies would have been strange. Now, the two have hinted publicly that the legal battles hindering their standing in the public eye are pushing them closer to each other than expected. 

Supreme Court Reporter Kaelan Deese is up with a piece for us this morning looking at the strange bedfellows Trump and Adams make and how they could both wind up benefiting from some key decisions the Supreme Court handed down in its last term. 

Trump, of course, was at the center of a case that forced the justices to lay out in stark terms the bounds of presidential immunity. The ruling was a victory for Trump, who has claimed that his actions on Jan. 6, 2021, were all carried out as part of his official duties as president, effectively barring him from being prosecuted for his alleged role in inciting the riot at the Capitol. 

Special counsel Jack Smith is disputing Trump’s attorneys’ theory of the case and laid out in a damning 165-page filing his arguments to Judge Tanya Chutkan why she should treat the former president’s actions as personal rather than public.

Chutkan unsealed that filing this week, to the frustration of Trump and his allies, who insist the move, just more than a month before Election Day, was a blatant attempt to interfere with the voting process. 

If Trump wins next month, he is all but assured to make the case against him go away, and Smith’s efforts would be moot. 

Adams doesn’t have that way out of charges that he took bribes and committed wire fraud. But he does have a clearer path to defending himself thanks to the Supreme Court’s ruling in Snyder v. United States earlier this year. 

“Adams’s high-level attorneys relied on a case called Snyder v. United States in their bid to dismiss the federal bribery charge. In a 6-3 decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, the high court found former Portage, Indiana, Mayor James Snyder was wrongfully convicted because he received a gift after, not before, carrying out an official government action,” Kaelan wrote. 

“The Snyder decision held that a federal law known as Section 666 prohibits bribing state and local officials but does not make it a crime for those officials to accept gratuities for past acts. Prosecutors also must prove an ‘official act’ took place in exchange for whatever the allegedly corrupt official was gaining,” he wrote. 

Adams’s attorneys are convinced that without prosecutors proving direct quid pro quo, there is no way the mayor can be found guilty. 

Click here to read more about the budding relationship between Trump and Adams.

Key to the Keystone State

Vice President Kamala Harris knows she needs to win Pennsylvania. There’s virtually no path to victory for her without the Keystone State’s 19 Electoral College votes. As we noted yesterday, she might be regretting not doing more to shore up those votes, but her chance at victory isn’t off the table. 

While she has the densely populated Pittsburgh and Philadelphia areas locked up, there is a reason Trump won the state in 2016 by 44,000 votes and that President Joe Biden had to wrestle it back from him in 2020. Outside of the safe blue regions, “Pennsyltucky” voters are much more skeptical of Harris and Democrats generally. 

White House Reporter Naomi Lim took a look at Harris’s attempts to steer into the center lane as a means of reaching those rural Appalachian-region voters stretching between Pennsylvania and Kentucky she needs to bolster support she has in the rest of the state. 

“There may not be many of these voters, but in a close race, they could matter,” Lancaster-based pollster Berwood Yost, director of Franklin and Marshall College’s Center for Opinion Research, told Naomi. “It is also true that there are still a number of voters who identify as traditional Republicans who are still making up their minds, so that strategy seems worth pursuing.”

Harris’s team is putting its money where its mouth is on trying to attract those voters too. Sixteen of the campaign’s 50 Pennsylvania offices are based in deep-red districts where Trump won by double digits in 2020, Naomi wrote. The campaign has also signed up a long list of Republicans and former Republicans to stump for Harris. 

The vice president has made more than a dozen trips to Pennsylvania this year. Trump hasn’t spent as much time there as Harris, though the most memorable moment of his campaign happened in Butler, Pennsylvania, this summer when he was shot by a would-be assassin and rushed off the stage. 

Trump is returning to Butler this weekend to continue the drawn-out fight for voters on the margins both candidates view as persuadable — and invaluable for victory. 

Click here to read more about Harris’s “Pennsyltucky” strategy

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For your radar

Biden does not have any public appearances today.

Harris will speak at a campaign rally in Flint, Michigan, at 6 p.m. Eastern.

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre will brief reporters at 1:30 p.m.

Trump will appear with Gov. Brian Kemp (R-GA) to deliver remarks about Hurricane Helene, though the appearance is not scheduled as a campaign event. The former president will then host a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina, at 7 p.m. 

Sen. J.D. Vance (R-OH) will deliver remarks in Lindale, Georgia, at 1 p.m.