On Wednesday, a federal judge unsealed a crucial filing that was made by special counsel Jack Smith’s newly updated election interference case against former President Donald Trump. According to Chris Pandolfo of Fox News, there are five important takeaways from the contents of the filing, and we’re going to take a look at them here.
The document was unsealed by U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Tanya Chutkan. The filing is 165-pages in length and contains an argument made by Smith who says that Trump is not immune to being prosecuted for an alleged scheme to overturn the results from the 2020 presidential election. Smith submitted the filing after the Supreme Court ruled earlier this year that a president is immune from being prosecuted for official acts done while serving in office.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith stated in the filing. “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 Supreme Court’s decision in Trump v. United States held that Smith could not prosecute Trump for the president’s alleged use of the Justice Department to look into unproven claims of widespread voter fraud in the 2020 election. In response, Smith filed an updated indictment that revised the allegations against Trump to fit within the scope of the Supreme Court’s decision. In the unsealed filing, Smith told the court that Trump is not immune from the remaining allegations against him and laid out his case for why Trump “must stand trial for his private crimes.”
Here are the five key details within the document you should know about:
1. Smith’s ‘factual proffer’
In the filing unsealed Wednesday, Smith outlined a “factual proffer,” alleging Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office” after losing the 2020 presidential election.
“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—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” Smith said.
“His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification,” he added.
Smith claims that the “throughline of these efforts was deceit,” alleging Trump and co-conspirators engaged in a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.”
2. Smith claims Trump’s personal attorney told POTUS election fraud claims were ‘bulls—’
Smith claims that several people close to Trump had told the former president his claims of election fraud were “bulls—.”
According to Smith, in one conversation, an unnamed Trump attorney had told Trump that the campaign was “looking into his fraud claims and had even hired external experts to do so, but could find no support for them.”
“He told the defendant that if the Campaign took these claims to court, they would get slaughtered because the claims are all ‘bulls—,’” the filing reveals, with Smith making the claim that an attorney talked with the former president the investigations and “debunkings on all major claims.” The lawyer supposedly told Trump that the audit done in Georgia completely disproved the claims that votes had been altered in any way.
3. New details on Trump’s interactions with Vice President Mike Pence
The filing details several alleged interactions between Trump and former Vice President Mike Pence in the days following the election. Smith details a Nov. 7, 2020, call between Pence and Trump in which Pence allegedly “tried to encourage” Trump “as a friend” by reminding him that he “took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life.” Smith also details a private lunch between Trump and Pence on Nov. 12, 2020, when Pence allegedly gave Trump a “face-saving option.” That option, according to the filing, was “don’t concede but recognize the process is over.”
During a different private lunch between Pence and the former president that was held on Nov. 20, 2020, the now former vice president attempted to encourage Trump to just go along with the results of the election and focus on running again in 2024. The former president is alleged to have responded by saying that 2024 was “so far off.”
In yet another private lunch on Dec. 21, Pence allegedly “encouraged” Trump “not to look at the election ‘as a loss – just an intermission.'” Later that day in the Oval Office, Trump allegedly asked Pence for advice on what he should do. According to Smith, Pence said, “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, Trump should ‘take a bow.’”
Smith also says that Trump didn’t show much regard for the safety of his own vice president during the riot on Jan. 6, 2021 at the Capitol building, after he came to understand Pence would not be supporting his attempt to halt the certification process.
The special counsel alleges that an aide for Trump, who is anonymous, “upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location… rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant [Trump] in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.”
Smith then states in the document that after the aide tells Trump the news, he allegedly “looked at him and said only, ‘So what?”
4. White House staffer allegedly overhears Trump say, ‘It doesn’t matter if you won or lost’
Smith alleges that Trump at multiple times showed complete disregard for those who informed him his claims of voter fraud were false, including Republican elections officials in states where Trump had claimed the election was stolen.
“Election officials, for instance, issued press releases and other public statements to combat the disinformation that the defendant and his allies were spreading,” Smith writes in the filing. “At one point long after the defendant had begun spreading false fraud claims, [REDACTED], a White House staffer traveling with the defendant, overheard him tell family members that ‘it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
5. Smith presents case against presidential immunity
Smith argues that based on a “factbound analysis” of Trump’s conduct, the court should determine that the former president was not acting in his official capacity when he challenged the election results and is therefore not immune from prosecution.
“None of the allegations or evidence is protected by presidential immunity,” Smith wrote, asserting Trump’s “scheme was a private one.”
“He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office,” Smith claims, Fox News revealed in the conclusion of its article. “To the limited extent that the superseding indictment and proffered evidence reflect official conduct, however, the Government can rebut the presumption of immunity because relying on that conduct in this prosecution will not pose a danger of intrusion on the authority or functions of the Executive Branch.”
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