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Special counsel Jack Smith laid out a detailed road map to his federal 2020 election subversion case against former President Trump in unprecedented court documents that were unsealed Wednesday, just about a month before the presidential election.
The 165-page filing revealed new details about Trump’s efforts to remain in power as it became clear he had lost the race to now-President Biden.
It’s likely the fullest picture of Trump’s alleged conduct that will be made public before voters head to the polls to decide whether to return him to the White House. If he wins, it’s expected that the federal cases against him will be dismissed by his Justice Department.
Trump sought to block the filing’s release, arguing in court papers that federal prosecutors are attempting to “usurp control and presentation” of the former president’s defense. His campaign called it proof that Smith and national Democrats are “hell-bent” on weaponizing the Justice Department to “cling to power,” and Trump in an exclusive interview with NewsNation on Wednesday railed against Smith.
Here are five revelations from Smith’s brief.
Trump showed disregard for Pence’s safety
It was previously known that Trump showed little regard for the safety of Vice President Mike Pence as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, but two new details revealed in Smith’s filing underlined that fact.
On Jan. 6, as rioters breached the Capitol in an apparent attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results, Trump took to Twitter.
He condemned Vice President Pence for lacking “courage”because he refused to disrupt the certification by rejecting the official electoral votes for Biden and instead, certifying false slates of electors that would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Trump and his allies mounted a pressure campaign against Pence to convince him that he had authority to use his role as president of the Senate to block the election results.
The tweet — which Smith revealed in the filing was sent by Trump as he sat alone in his White House dining room, after he became aware the Capitol had been breached — was blasted out at the same time Pence was evacuated from his Senate office, with angry rioters nearby.
When an aide alerted Trump that the vice president had been taken to a secure location, he replied only, “So what?”
The new details add to a trove of evidence underscoring Trump’s apathy toward his vice president’s safety that day. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson also told the now-disbanded Jan. 6 committee that Mark Meadows said Trump was flippant when told that crowds assembled near the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”
As former White House attorney Pat Cippolone approached the Oval Office to share that news, he bumped into Meadows.
“And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong,’” Hutchinson testified.
Trump’s knowledge of false election claims
The filing expands on earlier allegations from prosecutors that Trump was well aware that his claims the election was stolen were false.
They write that Trump was given “the unvarnished truth” about losing the election but continued to make false claims despite being told they were untrue by close campaign advisors.
Multiple aides told him he would be unable to mount successful legal challenges to the election and warned that Trump would be unable to prove his allegations in court.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump is said to have responded.
Other portions of the filing note that Trump and allies “repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day” and “made up figures from whole cloth.”
That includes baseless claims Trump promoted about noncitizens and dead people voting in elections.
Pence-Trump conversations
The filing fleshes out Pence’s pushback to Trump’s sustained campaign to get the vice president to buck his ceremonial duty to certify the election results.
Some examples are pulled from Pence’s book, including that Trump shouldn’t think of the election “as a loss – just an intermission” and that after pursuing all their legal options they would need to “take a bow.”
The filing notes that during a call to Trump to wish him merry Christmas on Dec. 25, Trump had sought to pressure him to reject his obligation to certify the votes, telling him, “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.”
But prosecutors also secured five pages of Pence’s contemporaneous notes from his conversation with Trump and attorney John Eastman who were pushing him to disregard the results.
During that meeting Trump apparently said “when there’s fraud the rules get changed, telling Pence to “be bold” and that “this whole thing is up to MP.”
Trump also told Pence that he had the “r[igh]t to do whatever you want to do” and again falsely claimed to have won various states by hundreds of thousands of votes.
“The meeting concluded with Pence – firm and clear – telling the defendant, ‘I’m not seeing this argument working,” the filing states.
Chaos at the polls
In the weeks after the election, Trump’s team sought to “create chaos” at polling places where votes were still being tabulated, Smith revealed in the filing.
One member of his campaign, unnamed and deemed a co-conspirator by prosecutors, allegedly attempted to create “confusion” at a Detroit polling center on Nov. 4, when it became apparent that votes were increasingly going to Biden.
When a colleague at the center said as much, the campaign employee told them to “find a reason it isn’t” going Biden’s way, even if it is, and give him “options to file litigation,” according to the filing.
The colleague suggested unrest would follow, to which the campaign employee replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Ronna McDaniel’s role
Details about former Republican National Committee (RNC) chairwoman Ronna McDaniel's role in the aftermath of the election also emerged in Smith’s new court papers.
During a meeting with Michigan GOP leaders, Trump dialed McDaniel into the call, despite her request not to participate on the advice of legal counsel who warned it could be viewed as lobbying, per the filing.
A month later, Trump spoke with McDaniel and asked her to promote a private report that claimed to identify flaws in the use of voting machines in a Michigan county. She resisted, telling the former president that she had discussed it with Michigan’s House Speaker, then Lee Chatfield, who gave a stark assessment: the report was “f–king nuts.”
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