Donald Trump began his drive to overthrow the Constitution of the U.S. and the 2020 election well before he actually lost that election by launching what he knew were false statements about voter fraud. To make matters worse, he committed actual criminal acts in what ended up as a failed attempt to maintain his power beyond the legal end of his term of office as president.
The stunning finding was in a report released Wednesday by Tanya Chutkan, the judge overseeing one of the many criminal cases against him. She unsealed the information she had received from Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, a filing which included never-before-heard evidence in the historic case against the ex-president.
The new evidence in the Smith filing explained how Trump pushed false claims of voter fraud and how he “resorted to crimes” in his illegal attempt to hold onto power.
The filing from Smith’s team lays bare the most complete look at what his team intends to prove if the case charging Trump with conspiring to overturn the election comes to trial. It goes well beyond what is in the original indictment and what was uncovered two years ago by the special Jan. 6 congressional committee.
Smith’s latest filing points to hitherto unknown information revealed by Trump’s closest aides who expose how an “increasingly desperate” president, while losing his grip on power, “used deceit to literally destroy every single stage of the election process in the United States.”
“So what?” the released document quotes Trump as telling a top aide after the aide told him the vice president, Mike Pence, had been rushed to a secure location because a crowd of rampaging Trump supporters storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, were calling for him to be hanged for not preventing the counting of electoral votes.
That part of the filing carries particular significance, coming as it did only a day after J.D. Vance, the Republican candidate for Vice President, admitted before the entire nation, in a televised debate, that he, unlike Pence, would have carried out the unconstitutional wishes of Trump had he been in the Pence position. It is Vance’s willingness to break the law for Trump, Democratic candidate Tim Walz said that night, which explains why Vance and not Pence was the person he (Walz) was debating that night and why voters should reject both Vance and Trump.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump declared, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges wouldn’t be able to prove the false allegations in court, the Smith filing states.
Trump is fuming over the filing having been made public after his lawyers worked overtime to try to prevent it from happening. He is using it has his latest excuse to dwell on alleged injustices against him rather than discussing many of the issues of importance to voters in the upcoming election.
Trump is still refusing to admit that he lost the 2020 election and Democrats, including Walz in the debate the other night, are making it an important part of their campaign to show that the ex-president is unfit to be returned to The White House. Vance refused, when asked by Walz during the debate, to also admit that Trump had lost the election. That refusal came on top of his refusal to answer a host of questions from moderators and his open lies about positions he has taken. Among them was a lie that he has never supported a national ban on abortion rights.
The latest Smith filing was submitted under seal, following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office, a decision that attempted to narrow the scope of the prosecution and eliminated the possibility of a trial before next month’s election.
In the filing, Smith shows the U.S. District Judge, Tanya Chutkan, that the offenses charged in the indictment were undertaken in Trump’s private, rather than presidential, capacity and can therefore remain part of the case as it moves forward.
Whether the matter will ever get to trial depends upon whether Trump wins the presidency. A sycophant he appoints as attorney general could seek the dismissal of the case or Trump could attempt to pardon himself.
It is now up to Chutkan to decide which of Trump’s acts are official conduct for which Trump is immune from prosecution and which are, as Smith’s team put it, “private crimes” on which the case can proceed.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith wrote, adding, “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”
Immediately after the election, prosecutors say, Trump operatives tried to sow confusion in the tabulation of ballots. In one instance, a Trump operative was told that results favoring Joe Biden at a Michigan polling center were accurate. The Trump operative said “find a reason it isn’t” because “I want to file litigation against the Biden campaign.”
The filing also shows how Trump claimed fraud despite knowing their was no fraud. The filing shows how he actually admitted to aides that allegations made by his lawyer, Sidney Powell, were “crazy.” Nevertheless, he promoted those allegations on Twitter.
The filing shows how Trump could care less about the accuracy of his claims about alleged fraud. He told his wife, Melania, and his daughter and son-in-law, on Marine One that “it does not matter if you won or lost the election” but that he was making the claims anyway.
The filing also includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch on Nov. 12, 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him, “Don’t concede but recognize the process is over.”
In another lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the election results and run again in 2024.
“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, the filing states.
By early December 2020, the Smith filing notes that Trump began implementing congressional participation in his planned coup. “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, Trump “disregarded” 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.”
Of the more than 1,200 Tweets Trump sent during the weeks detailed in the indictment, prosecutors say, the vast majority were about the 2020 election, including those falsely claiming Pence could reject electors even though the vice president had told Trump that he had no such power.
The Smith filing talks about how the torrent of lies by Trump reached an apex in his speech at the Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021. It shows how Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding. His personal desperation was at its zenith” that morning as he was “only hours from the certification proceeding that spelled the end,” Smith wrote.
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