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Background: Special counsel Jack Smith. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite, File) Inset: Republican presidential candidate and former President Donald Trump speaks to the crowd during a caucus event, Saturday, Dec. 2, 2023, at Kirkwood Community College in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. (Geoff Stellfox/The Gazette via AP)
In a filing entered Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith offered a taste of what evidence prosecutors will present at Donald Trump’s impending election subversion trial in Washington, D.C., including records they say reflect Trump’s track record of making baseless claims of election fraud since as far back as 2012.
In the nine-page brief before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, prosecutor Molly Gaston cited Trump’s eerily familiar sentiment that voting machines had been rigged against Mitt Romney in 2012 when he ran against Barack Obama.
The same thing occurred in 2016, Gaston wrote, when Trump “claimed repeatedly with no basis, that there was widespread voter fraud including through public statements and tweets.”
These details, while far separated in time from the events of Jan. 6, 2021, are still relevant and should be considered admissible evidence, the prosecutors urged.
The special counsel also indicated that they would enter evidence at trial that showed Trump’s history of remarks where he “repeatedly refused to commit to a peaceful transfer of power,” the filing states.
It was during a Sept. 23, 2020, White House press conference when Trump was asked if he would commit to a peaceful transition of power if he lost the 2020 election and he refused.
“We’ll have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” Trump told reporters in 2020.
When a reporter pressed him and then asked whether that would be a peaceful transfer of power, Trump replied: “I know. I know. We want to have — get rid of the ballots and you’ll have a very trans — we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly, there’ll be a continuation. The ballots are out of control. You know it.”
Trump then exited the briefing in a hurry, citing an “emergency call” that had come up.
He used the same strategy in 2016, Gaston wrote Tuesday. During a presidential debate that year, Trump was asked if he would accept the results and he said he would “look at it at the time.”
When a moderator pressed him, Trump said: “What I’m saying is that I will tell you in time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?”
All of this goes toward showing Trump’s intent in 2021 to perpetrate a conspiracy meant to overturn the results of the 2020 election, prosecutors argue.
Additionally, they point to his “post-conspiracy embrace” of Jan. 6 rioters, including those “particularly violent and notorious” ones like former Proud Boys leader Henry “Enrique” Tarrio.
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Tarrio and other Proud Boys were found guilty of seditious conspiracy earlier this year.
Just this September Trump appeared on the Meet the Press and lamented Tarrio’s sentence of 22 years: “I want to tell you, he and other people have been treated horribly.”
“The defendant then criticized the kinds of lengthy sentences received only by defendants who, like Tarrio, committed the most serious crimes on January 6. Similarly, the defendant has chosen to publicly and vocally support the ‘January 6 Choir,’ a group of defendants held at the District of Columbia jail, many of whose criminal history and/or crimes on January 6 were so violent that their pretrial release would pose a danger to the public,” Gaston wrote.
Trump has “financially supported and celebrated these offenders” by promoting their recording of the National Anthem and sharing it his political rallies.
These are many of the same people, she added, who assaulted law enforcement on Jan. 6.
Prosecutors said Tuesday that they also intend to show a pattern threats and harassment aimed at Trump’s perceived enemies or adversaries. They will do this with witness testimony tied directly to Tump’s lies about the 2020 election results.
There is also admissible evidence, prosecutors say, that shows Trump and his alleged co-conspirators knew their claims of widespread fraud were false and when challenged, they retaliated against officials who undermined them.
An example of this retaliation was cited in the 9-page brief but it was mostly redacted. Notably, it involved “co-conspirator 1” — believed to be Rudy Giuliani — and Trump and an alleged criminal effort to retaliate against the former head of the Republican National Committee for refuting Trump’s “and co-conspirator 1’s lies about election fraud.”
Other evidence will come in too with Judge Chutkan’s permission, including November 2020 texts where one Trump campaign employee in Detroit ,who is described as an “unindicted co-conspirator,” allegedly encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction once it became clear that the vote count was trending in favor of now-President Joe Biden.
Around this same time, Trump was making repeated false claims of riggery and fraud at that same election center in Detroit, Gaston noted, writing:
The Government will also show that around the time of these messages, an election official at the TCF Center observed that as Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.
Thereafter, Trump made repeated false claims regarding election activities at the TCF Center, when in truth his agent was seeking to cause a riot to disrupt the count. This evidence is admissible to demonstrate that the defendant, his co-conspirators, and agents had knowledge that the defendant had lost the election, as well as their intent and motive to obstruct and overturn the legitimate results.
