Jack Smith lays out his case against Trump in vivid detail

Source: Politico | October 2, 2024 | Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein

In a newly unsealed legal brief, the special counsel revealed private, detailed conversations Trump had with GOP officials in his bid to subvert the 2020 election.

As his bid to hold on to power in 2020 grew increasingly desperate, Donald Trump pressed Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel to help promote a false claim that voting machines in Michigan had been manipulated.

McDaniel balked. She had spoken to the state’s House speaker, Lee Chatfield, a Republican, who told her the claim was “fucking nuts.”

That detail was among a dossier of evidence unfurled Wednesday in a newly released legal brief by special counsel Jack Smith. The 165-page filing offers the most detailed look at Smith’s case charging Donald Trump with orchestrating multiple criminal conspiracies in his failed quest to subvert Joe Biden’s victory.

The filing is replete with new revelations about the alleged scheme drawn from interviews with key figures like former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows.

“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote. “The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

The filing is a blueprint of the evidence the special counsel hopes to present to a jury someday. The trial in the case had been scheduled to begin earlier this year, but the Supreme Court delayed the proceedings by eight months while it weighed Trump’s claim that he was immune from the charges.

The high court’s ruling endorsed a sweeping view of presidential immunity and tasked the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, with reviewing Smith’s evidence to determine whether any of it should be barred from consideration. That process could take months to resolve and likely result in yet another trip to the Supreme Court.

Smith’s new filing is squarely aimed at showing Trump’s conduct in 2020 was taken in his capacity as a candidate for office – not in his official capacity as president. As a result, the special counsel argues, Trump’s conduct should not be protected by immunity.

Smith submitted the sprawling legal brief to Chutkan last week, but it remained sealed until Wednesday. Over Trump’s objection, Chutkan publicly released a redacted version of the filing.

The filing contains details of private conversations Trump engaged in with Republican legislators and operatives throughout the post-election period in 2020, describing how they nearly all warned him that his allegations of election fraud were flimsy and false.

Smith also accuses Trump of intentionally stoking the fury of the mob that ransacked the Capitol and assaulted police on Jan. 6, 2021. Once Pence refused to join the alleged conspiracy, the special counsel alleges, Trump realized his only option to cling to power was to derail Congress’ certification of the Electoral College results on Jan. 6.

Smith reveals that Trump was alone in the Oval Office dining room when he issued an incendiary tweet about Pence during some of the most violent moments of the attack. Rioters — some of them chanting “hang Mike Pence!” — amplified the tweet, which accused Pence of lacking “the courage to do what should have been done.”

Many of the new details in the filing are clearly the result of interviews Smith’s team conducted with people who spoke directly to Trump during the critical two-month period between Election Day and Jan. 6 — and phone records confirmi. When many of Trump’s aides and other fellow Republicans responded to his false claims with skepticism or outright repudiation, Trump responded with a mix of private pressure and public attacks, prosecutors say.

Trump’s lawyers aggressively fought Smith’s request to file the compilation of evidence with the court and opposed placing it on the public record. However, Chutkan ordered the release of the filing Wednesday with limited redactions. Though most names are blacked out in the public version of the document, many people can be identified from the context in which they are mentioned.

Trump responded angrily to the judge’s decision, again asserting without evidence that Smith’s prosecutors are driven by politics.

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