Special counsel details lengths Trump went to in bid to overturn 2020 election result
Former president Donald Trump laid the groundwork to try to overturn the 2020 election even before he lost and knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud, court documents claim.
Donald Trump laid the groundwork to try to overturn the 2020 election even before he lost, knowingly pushed false claims of voter fraud and “resorted to crimes” in his failed bid to cling to power, according to a court filing unsealed on Wednesday.
The filing from special counsel Jack Smith’s team offers the most comprehensive view to date of what prosecutors intend to prove if the case charging Mr Trump with conspiring to overturn the election reaches trial. Although a months-long congressional investigation and the indictment itself have chronicled in stark detail Mr Trump’s efforts to undo the election, the filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Mr Trump’s closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who, while losing his grip on the White House, “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process”.
“So what?” the filing quotes Mr Trump as telling an aide after being advised that vice-president Mike Pence had been rushed to a secure location after a crowd of violent Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, to try to prevent the counting of electoral votes by congress.
“The details don’t matter,” Mr Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer mounting his legal challenges wouldn’t be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.
The brief was made public over the Trump legal team’s objections in the final month of a closely contested presidential race in which Democrats have sought to make Mr Trump’s refusal to accept the election results four years ago central to their claims that he is unfit for office.
The filing was submitted, initially under seal, following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office, a decision that narrowed the scope of the prosecution and eliminated the possibility of a trial before next month’s election. The purpose of the brief is to persuade federal district judge Tanya Chutkan that the offences charged in the indictment were undertaken in Mr Trump’s private, rather than presidential, capacity and can therefore remain part of the case as it moves forward. Judge Chutkan permitted a redacted version to be made public, even though Mr Trump’s lawyers argued it was unfair to unseal it so close to the election.
The brief nonetheless functions as a road map for the testimony and evidence prosecutors would elicit before a jury.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Mr Smith’s team wrote. “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional”. Mr Trump, in a post on his Truth Social platform, said the case would end with his “complete victory.”
The filing alleges Mr Trump “laid the groundwork” for rejecting the election results before the contest was over, telling advisers that in the event he held an early lead he would “declare victory before the ballots were counted and any winner was projected”.
Immediately after the election his advisers sought to sow chaos in the counting of votes.
Prosecutors also alleged Mr Trump advanced claims of fraud despite knowing they were false, recounting how he conceded to others that allegations of election irregularities made by attorney Sidney Powell were “crazy” and referenced science-fiction series Star Trek. Even so, days later, he promoted on Twitter a lawsuit she was about to file.
In demonstrating his apparent indifference to the accuracy of the election fraud claims, prosecutors also cite an account of a White House staffer who after the election overheard Mr Trump telling his wife, daughter and son-in-law on Marine One: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
The filing also includes details of conversations between Mr Trump and Mr Pence, including a lunch on November 12, 2020, in which Mr Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Mr Trump, telling him: “Don’t concede but recognise the process is over.”
Prosecutors say that by December 5, the defendant was starting to think about congress’s role in the process. “For the first time, he mentioned to Pence the possibility of challenging the election results in the House of Representatives,” it says, citing a phone call.
But, prosecutors wrote, Mr Trump “disregarded” Mr Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states – including those in his own party – who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false”.
AP
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