Special prosecutor Jack Smith has returned to the charge against former President Donald Trump with a 165-page brief published this Wednesday in which he describes his “increasingly desperate” attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost against Joe Biden . In his allegations, part of which are covered by summary secrecy, the prosecutor assures that the acts of the then president were not typical of his position, but rather constituted “private criminal conduct.” With that distinction, he tries to maintain the accusation despite the Supreme Court’s ruling last July that recognized broad immunity for presidents in the exercise of their office.
The new document, which Trump’s lawyers have tried to prevent from being published, contains the most complete description of the Republican’s attempts to steal the presidential election four years ago, overturning the result of the polls. Judge Tanya Chutkan has decided that it be published after listening to the parties, although there are fragments crossed out.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the brief says. “With private conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states he had lost,” it adds.
“The defendant claims he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it involved official conduct. It’s not like that. Although the defendant was the sitting president during the accused conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally private,” he argues. And he adds: “Working with a team of private conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he used multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deception, the government function of collecting and counting votes, a function in which the defendant, as president , I had no official role.”
Deceptions and lies
The prosecutor points out that Trump’s efforts to overturn the election result included lying to state officials to induce them to ignore true vote counts; fabricate fraudulent electoral votes in the seven states in which he wanted to change the result (Pennsylvania, Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, Michigan, Wisconsin and New Mexico); attempting to recruit Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as Senate President, to obstruct Congress’ certification of the election using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and failing all that, leading an angry mob of supporters to the US Capitol to obstruct Congressional certification.
“The common thread of these efforts was deception: the consciously false claims of electoral fraud by the defendant and his conspirators,” says the prosecutor, who maintains that these lies were used to promote three conspiracies: one to interfere in the function of the federal government of electoral scrutiny, another to obstruct the official procedure by which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential elections and a third against the right of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.
The brief reveals details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on November 12, 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him: “Do not concede, but recognizes that the process is over,” according to prosecutors, who questioned Pence before a grand jury. At another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the election results and run again in 2024. “I don’t know, 2024 is too far away,” Trump replied, according to the story.
The then-president “disregarded” Pence “in the same way that he ignored dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his legal claims and those of his allies, and that he ignored officials in the target states—including those in his own party—who declared publicly that he had lost and that his specific allegations of fraud were false,” the brief says.
There are new facts, but also new legal arguments on already known facts. For example, prosecutors are trying to convince the judge that tweets the president posted on Jan. 6 saying that Vice President Mike Pence had let him down by admitting election defeat are private acts by a candidate.
The prosecutor maintains that Trump intentionally lied to the public, state election officials and his own vice president in an effort to cling to power after losing the election, while privately describing some of the voter fraud claims as “crazy.” The brief suggests that Trump did not believe attorney Sidney Powell’s claims that voting machines had been hacked to aid election fraud, even though his allies continued to spread them. Smith maintains that when Powell called Trump to talk about it, Trump muted the microphone and “mocked and laughed” at Powell, “called her claims ‘crazy,’ and made a reference to the science fiction series Star Trek when describing their allegations.”
The indictment holds the then president responsible for the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021. “The defendant also knew that he had only one last hope left to prevent the certification of Biden as president: the large angry crowd in front of him. “So for more than an hour, the defendant gave a speech designed to inflame his supporters and motivate them to march on the Capitol,” the brief says.
Last August, the prosecutor obtained a new indictment, for the same four crimes of which he initially accused Trump, which he ensures is limited to what are not official acts covered by the broad immunity that the Supreme Court recognized to Trump after an appeal. against the initial accusation.
The prosecutor accuses the former president of four crimes: conspiracy to defraud the US Government, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction or attempted obstruction of an official proceeding and conspiracy to violate civil rights. Trump maintains that the elections were stolen from him, but the prosecutor does not accuse him of this great baseless hoax, but rather of his actions to alter the result and prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. Prosecutors consider that Trump’s conspiracy to remain in office began on November 13, 2020, although he had already been preparing it since before the elections.
The election interference case being pursued in Washington is a federal case. After multiple delays due to the defense’s delaying maneuvers, there is no date set for the trial. If Trump wins the presidential election on November 5, he can get the Justice Department to drop the charges.