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Special counsel Jack Smith provides the most comprehensive picture yet of his 2020 election case against Trump in a new filing
Enterprise

Special counsel Jack Smith provides the most comprehensive picture yet of his 2020 election case against Trump in a new filing



CNN

A federal judge in Washington, DC, has released the most comprehensive account yet of the 2020 election conspiracy case against Donald Trump, laying out what special counsel Jack Smith calls “private criminal conduct” by the former president.

The 165-page document comes from Smith’s office and represents the most comprehensive evidence to date in the election subversion case against Trump.

Throughout the document, Smith argues that the actions Trump took to overturn the election were in his private capacity – as a candidate – and not in his official capacity as president. That argument stems from the Supreme Court’s July decision, which granted the former president broad immunity for official actions but left prosecutors free to prosecute Trump for unofficial steps he took.

“At its core, the defendant’s plan was a private scheme,” prosecutors wrote in the motion. “He made extensive use of private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and stood as a candidate for office in a private capacity.”

The filing ties together what prominent witnesses told a federal grand jury and the FBI about Trump, along with other never-before-released evidence investigators have collected about the former president’s actions leading up to and on January 6, 2021.

The release of the motion, previously filed under seal, is the latest major development in Smith’s long-running effort to prosecute Trump over his actions to overturn the 2020 election, even as the former president seeks a second term in a close race with the vice president aims for Kamala Harris. The case, which has already been before the Supreme Court once, has been repeatedly delayed as Trump sought to delay the prosecution until after next month’s election.

The document is divided into four sections. The first section lays out the case that prosecutors said they would try to prove in court, including a summary of the evidence. The second section gives U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan a roadmap for assessing which actions are official — and therefore potentially covered by immunity — and which are not. The third section explains how the principles should apply in the Trump case. The fourth is a brief conclusion calling on Chutkan to rule that the actions described are not protected by immunity and that Trump “shall be tried on the superseding charge.”

Prosecutors say Trump was told by advisers that the 2020 vote was unlikely to be completed on Election Day and that he could misleadingly look ahead when counting ballots on election night, only to fall behind once all the ballots were cast be counted. Still, Trump told his advisers that he would claim victory before the ballots were fully counted, prosecutors say.

A private political adviser described Trump’s plan three days before Election Day 2020: “He will declare victory. That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner,” the filing says.

That aide, who was not named by prosecutors, also described the Democratic tilt of mail-in voting as “a natural disadvantage” and said, “Trump will exploit that. That’s our strategy.”

Smith’s office emphasized the private and political nature of Trump’s actions surrounding the 2020 election.

“The executive branch,” prosecutors wrote, “has no authority or function to elect the next president.”

This argument seemed intended for federal appeals courts, including the Supreme Court, which in recent years have placed a strong emphasis on the historical understanding of the separation of powers.

In other words, Smith argues that Trump’s attempt to overturn the election was necessarily private because the Constitution does not give a president official authority to choose his successor.

“The conduct alleged against the defendant directly violates these fundamental principles,” the motion states. “He attempted to encroach on powers expressly granted by the Constitution to other branches in order to further his own interest and maintain himself in power against the will of the people.”

In the filing, prosecutors focus particularly on what Trump learned from a White House staffer referenced in the filing

“P9” as they attempt to show that Trump was fully aware that he had lost the election when he pursued the reversal plans.

The person, identified only as “P9,” appears to have personally spoken to Trump over the phone about the fake voter strategy and has had repeated text conversations with other people on the campaign about how “crazy” or “illegal” the strategy was. “, says the file.

When Trump told the aide that he would not pay the private attorney pushing his legal challenges unless the challenges were successful, the aide told Trump that the private attorney would never be paid. That prompted laughter and a “we’ll see” from Trump, the files say. (The private attorney is identified by prosecutors as Co-Conspirator 1, whom CNN previously identified as Rudy Giuliani.)

In a subsequent conversation, the White House official told Trump that Giuliani could not prove his false claims in court, and Trump told the aide, “The details don’t matter.”

The letter details several other interactions between the White House staffer and Trump in which Trump was told the election fraud allegations would not hold up in court.

In the file released on Wednesday, prosecutors name witnesses they want to call as witnesses against Trump in a trial – including election officials in battleground states and his deputy chief of staff in the White House.

Prosecutors say they also want to show a jury Trump’s campaign speech on January 4, 2021, in Georgia and his campaign speech on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021, shortly before the riots at the US Capitol.

And they would like to show the jury tweets that they say could prove that Trump pushed the public voter fraud campaign, knowing there were none that were shared widely enough to overturn his loss. They argue that these tweets were not part of Trump’s official work as president.

At trial, prosecutors said they would like to call the only other Trump adviser who had access to his Twitter account to testify that Trump sent tweets on Jan. 6, 2021, that sought to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence , to stop counting electoral votes in the Capitol. The person is described as a deputy White House chief of staff.

“The government will find of Individual 45 at trial that he was the only person other than defendant able to post to defendant’s Twitter account, that he sent tweets only at defendant’s express direction, and that Person 45 did not send certain tweets “certain tweets” – particularly a tweet sent by Trump that said Pence did not have the courage to block the certification of the vote.

Such a statement would allow prosecutors to claim in court that they had evidence of a moment like this:

“At 2:24 p.m., Trump was alone in his dining room,” prosecutors write in the filing, “when he posted a tweet attacking Pence and fueling the ongoing insurrection: ‘Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have done.’ It was done to protect our country and our Constitution and to give states the opportunity to certify a corrected set of facts, rather than the fraudulent or inaccurate facts they were previously required to certify. The USA demands the truth!’”

This story has been updated with additional developments.

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