Trump ‘pursued multiple criminal means to overturn election’ new special counsel filing claims
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, culminating in his failure to stop a mob that tried to do it with violence, 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 — the fullest picture yet of Smith’s case — follows his renewed attempt to prosecute Trump in the wake of the Supreme Court’s decision that granted him some immunity from criminal prosecution for his spurious efforts to reverse his loss.
That new superseding indictment retains the same four core criminal charges against him, as Smith navigates a Supreme Court ruling that a president is “absolutely” immune from criminal prosecution for actions that stem from official duties in office, and retains “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.
Trump was acting as a candidate for office, not an office holder, when he committed the crimes at the center of the case, according to Smith.
The former president “must stand trial for his private crimes as would any other citizen,” Smith adds.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” according to Smith.
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.
The filing then documents the state-by-state efforts from Trump and his unindicted co-conspirators and allies to pressure state officials, election workers and others to validate his scheme to reverse his loss, then organize allies to submit fraudulent election certificates falsely stating that he won.
“The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud,” according to Smith’s team.
The filing lists 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.”
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