WASHINGTON — Former President Donald Trump acted “fundamentally” as a private candidate for office and not as president of the United States when he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss, special counsel Jack Smith’s team argued Wednesday in a filing that revealed new details . of the plan at the heart of Trump’s federal election interference case.
The filing alleges that Trump knew the claims he spread about the 2020 election were lies, with Smith’s team alleging that Trump did not believe his own falsehoods but instead spread them as part of his broader plan to gain power to stay.
While officers were being brutally attacked at the Capitol on Jan. 6, Smith’s team says, Trump was scrolling through Twitter, according to an analysis by an FBI expert that is among the revelations in the new filing. Smith’s team says a future trial will include testimony from the FBI’s forensic expert.
“The phone activity logs indicate that the suspect used his phone, and specifically the Twitter application, consistently throughout the day after returning from the Ellipse speech,” Smith’s team wrote.
The special counsel’s office is also calling for the inclusion of testimony from former Vice President Mike Pence, saying some of the discussions between Trump and Pence did not take place in their official roles but rather were discussions “in their private capacities as running mates’.
Smith’s team said Pence “gradually and gently tried to convince the defendant to accept the lawful outcome of the election, even if it meant they lost.”
In a luncheon discussion on Nov. 12, noted in the filing, Pence presented a “face-saving option” for Trump, telling him “not to concede, but to acknowledge that the process is over.”
Another piece of evidence Smith’s team plans to introduce is the testimony of an unnamed presidential aide who overheard a comment Trump made to family members aboard Marine One after the 2020 election.
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election,” Trump reportedly said. “You still have to fight hard.”
The filing also expands on the Smith team’s earlier claim that a member of Trump’s campaign encouraged riots at the TCF Center in Detroit, where a pro-Trump mob tried to stop vote counting on Nov. 1 in what was America’s largest black city. September 4, 2021, the day after the elections. “Let them riot,” an unnamed campaign worker texted a colleague, according to the filing. “Do it!!!”
The filing is in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling that Trump had immunity for some actions he took as president and that prosecutors could not use his official actions in their case. Smith’s team argued that the 2024 Republican presidential candidate “should be tried for his private crimes like any other citizen” and a federal grand jury returned a superseding indictment against him in August, amending Smith’s case to comply the Supreme Court’s order.
Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office” after his loss, Smith’s team wrote in the filing Wednesday, arguing that he “launched a series of increasingly desperate schemes to undermine legitimate election results in seven states he had lost – Arizona, undone. Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.”
Smith’s team again argued that Trump knew his falsehoods about the 2020 election were in fact lies and said he relied on his own campaign staff and volunteers, including his campaign manager, deputy campaign manager, senior campaign adviser and a campaign staffer to cover the election wear. the alleged plan.
“Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he used multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deception, the government function that collects and counts votes – a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role,” they wrote.
Trump, Smith’s team said, was told that election night results could be misleading because it would take a while to count the ballots, which were expected to favor Joe Biden. Trump, Smith’s team said, declared to his advisers that he would “simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and a winner was projected” and began publicly laying the groundwork by telling his supporters that he would lose alone if there was fraud.
Trump and his co-conspirators had a “deliberate disregard for the truth” and Smith’s team said it plans to prove at trial that they engaged in a pattern of deception and “made up figures from whole cloth.” including the ever-changing number of Non-Citizen Voters that Trump’s team falsely claimed had voted in Arizona.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the Smith team’s filing “ridden with lies” and tied its release to the vice presidential debate, even though it was known to be coming soon. “Crazy Jack Smith and the radical Democrats in Washington DC are determined to use guns. the Ministry of Justice in an attempt to stay in power,” Cheung said. “President Trump dominates, and radical Democrats across the Deep State are panicking. This entire case is a partisan, unconstitutional witch hunt that must be completely rejected, along with ALL remaining Democratic hoaxes.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
