A federal judge on Wednesday unsealed a redacted motion by Special Counsel Jack Smith detailing evidence against former President Donald Trump in his criminal election interference case in Washington, D.C.
The 165-page document was filed by Smith as part of his argument that Trump can still be prosecuted for efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss despite a Supreme Court ruling in July that he has presumptive presidential immunity for official acts.
Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the filing less than five weeks before the Republican nominee Trump will face Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee, in the 2024 presidential election.
If Trump wins the election, he will have the power to order the Department of Justice to dismiss the criminal case against him.
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so,” Smith’s office said in the filing.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” the filing said. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant 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 — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.
The filing says Chutkan should reject the argument that Trump is immune from any of the remaining allegations not barred by the Supreme Court’s ruling.
The motion says that after the November election, as Trump “claimed [ballot fraud] without proof, his private operatives sought to create chaos, rather than seek clarity at polling places where states were continuing to tabulate votes.”
The filing says that on Nov. 4, 2020, a campaign employee and “co-conspirator” of Trump tried to sow confusion at the vote count being held at the TCF Center in Detroit, Michigan, which “looked unfavorable to” Trump.
The name of the employee is redacted in the filing, which contains many such redactions of the names of individuals and other details.
When a colleague of that unidentified campaign employee told that person that a batch a votes appeared to be heavily in favor of Joe Biden, the employee responded “find a reason it isn’t,” “give me options to file litigation” and “even if it [is bs],” the filing alleges.
“When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers Riot” during the Florida vote count in the 2000 election, the campaign employee “responded ‘Make them riot’ and ‘Do it!!!,’ ” the motion alleges.
The filing also provides numerous examples of how then-Vice President Mike Pence allegedly tried to “gradually and gently” convince Trump to accept his election loss.
On Nov. 7, 2020, as major news outlets called the race for Biden, Pence “tried to encourage” Trump, saying, “You took a dying political party and give it a new lease on life,” according to the filing.
And in a private lunch on Nov. 12, Pence offered Trump a way to end the save face while ending his challenges: “Don’t concede but recognize [the] process is over,” prosecutors wrote.
Four days later, Pence in another private lunch allegedly tried to urge Trump to accept the election results and run again in 2024.
Trump responded, “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” according to the filing.
On Dec. 21, Pence allegedly “encouraged” Trump “not to look at the election ‘as a loss — just an intermission,’ ” the filing said.
Later that day, Trump asked Pence in the Oval Office, “What do you think we should do?”
Pence replied that if all options have been exhausted and “we still came up short, [the defendant] should ‘take a bow,’ ” according to the filing.
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