“Make Them Riot”: Newly Unsealed Filing Gives New Details Of Federal Election Conspiracy Case Against Donald Trump
A newly unsealed filing reveals additional evidence in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s election conspiracy case against Donald Trump, as the prosecutor argued that the former president “resorted to crimes to try and stay in office.”
The filing, made public Wednesday, details the extent to which a bevy of advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, sought to convince Trump that his challenge to the 2020 presidential election would not succeed and that it lacked evidence, but the then-president went ahead with his election-rigging claims anyway.
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“The evidence demonstrates that the defendant knew his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisers — acting not in an official capacity but in a private or campaign-related capacity — told him they were not true,” Smith wrote in the brief.
Throughout the filing are instances where state lawmakers and officials told Trump and his allies that their rigged election claims were not credible.
In one instance, according to the filing, a White House staffer overheard Trump tell family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Smith and his team wrote that at trial, they intended to show that, in some instances, Trump and his team “made up figures from whole cloth,” including their shifting figures on the numbers of non-citizens who allegedly cast ballots.
In another instance, after an unidentified Trump aide, described only as a “campaign operative,” was told by a colleague at a Detroit, MI vote-counting center that they thought a batch of ballots would be in Biden’s favor, the operative said to “find a reason it isn’t.” “When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election,” the campaign operative “responded, ‘Make them riot!’ and ‘Do it!'”
Read the Trump election conspiracy filing.
Smith filed the 165-page document with U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan to lay out what parts of his case against Trump do not fall within official acts while he was president. Smith’s case — in which Trump was charged with four counts of conspiring to remain in power after the 2020 election — was put on hold as the Supreme Court weighed whether the former president had immunity from prosecution. The justices ruled 6-3 that Trump was immune for official acts as president, sending the case back to Chutkan’s court for revision.
Smith made a number of arguments that evidence gathered would not fall within the boundaries of presidential official acts but instead were campaign related, including tweets that Trump was posting as the January 6th riot at the Capitol was unfolding.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try and stay in office,” Smith wrote in the filing. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.”
Trump responded to the latest filing today with a post on Truth Social, in which he wrote, “THIS ILLEGAL ACTION TAKEN BY THE JUSTICE DEPARTMENT, INCLUDING THEIR RAID ON MAR-A-LAGO FOR A CASE THAT WAS DISMISSED, WILL END JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS – WITH COMPLETE VICTORY FOR “PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP.”
He also claimed that the case was an effort to weaponize the Justice Department and “interfere” in the 2024 election. Smith was appointed as special counsel as a way of keeping his prosecutions independent from Attorney General Merrick Garland.
News networks all carried news of today’s late-afternoon filing, and MSNBC is planning an 8 p.m. ET special this evening with Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow and Lawrence O’Donnell.
The filing identifies instances where Trump “began to plant the seeds” for falsely declaring himself the victor on election night even though the ballots had yet to be fully counted. The filing cites a July 19, 2020 interview where Trump is asked if he would accept the results, and he said that he would “have to see” and “it depends.”
Smith’s filing also details the instances where Pence tried to convince Trump to accept the results. Pence appeared before a grand jury to offer testimony. In a November 23 phone call, Trump told Pence that his private attorney “was not optimistic about the election challenges,” according to the filing.
The filing also goes into detail about Trump’s conduct on January 6. After giving a speech at the Ellipse in which he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol, where Congress was certifying the electoral vote count, Trump returned to the White House. There, he went to the dining room next to the Oval Office and started to watch the unfolding scene on TV. His advisers were urging him to send a message to his supporters to try to diffuse the situation.
“The defendant refused, responding that the people at the Capitol were angry because the election was stolen,” according to the filing. “Eventually, all of the defendant’s staffers left him alone in the dining room. Fox News continued to report on the growing crisis at the Capitol.”
Smith wrote that they planned to offer testimony from an FBI forensic examiner as to the news and social media apps on Trump’s phone. That examiner would “describe the activity occurring on the phone throughout the afternoon of January 6.”
Smith indicated that some of the alleged incidents cited in the filing were ones he did not plan to use at a trial.
That included an exchange Trump had with an aide shortly after he tweeted, at 2:24 p.m., “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!”
According to the filing, the aide had been informed that Pence had been rushed to a secure location at the Capitol, and rushed to the dining room to inform Trump in the hopes that he “would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.” Instead, after the aide delivered the news, Trump “looked at him and said only, ‘So what?'”
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