Special counsel Jack Smith has outlined a sprawling criminal case against Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election, detailing for the first time the former president’s “increasingly desperate efforts” to cling to power with “knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
Trump intentionally lied to voters, election officials, and his own vice president Mike Pence in what amounted to a criminal effort to stay in office, according to the document filed in federal court in Washington DC on Wednesday.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing says. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost.”
The 165-page filing follows Smith’s renewed attempt to prosecute Trump in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision that granted Trump some immunity from criminal prosecution for his spurious efforts to reverse his loss.
That new superseding indictment retains the same four core criminal charges, as Smith navigates the Supreme Court decision affirming that a president is “absolutely” immune from criminal prosecution for actions that stem from official duties in office, and granted him “presumptive” immunity for actions in the “outer perimeter” of those duties.
Smith notes in the latest document that those co-conspirators acted in their “private” roles, not as public servants.
In that capacity, Trump — “working with a team of private co-conspirators — had “acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted,” according to prosecutors.
The lengthy filing traces the history of Trump’s false claims of election fraud, characterized as an attempt to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, despite knowing that they were false.
It includes multiple instances in which Trump’s own advisers disproved his claims, to which Trump allegedly replied: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Pence repeatedly told Trump that there was no evidence of fraud to alter the election’s outcome, which Trump ignored, according to prosecutors.
Prosecutors intend to introduce at trial evidence of Trump’s “deliberate disregard for the truth” and show that Trump and his allies “made up figures from whole cloth.”
This is a developing story