When special counsel Jack Smith charged former President Trump last year with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, the federal indictment had only one defendant: Trump himself. In a court filing unsealed this week, Smith drew on the actions of a much larger group to tell how Trump lost the race but sought to stay in the White House, reports the New York Times. He populated his brief with a large cast of characters — lawyers, longtime Trump aides, campaign operatives, even some rioters who stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — who all played a supporting role either for or against Trump’s attempts to cling to power. Most of them were not named in the filing, and were referred to only by numbers, though many of their identities could be divined from details in the brief. The references started with Person 1 and went all the way to Person 71.
Smith’s investigation was able to weave their stories together with new detail. One player whose actions were documented in new detail was Stephen. Bannon, a longtime Trump adviser who had worked on Trump’s first campaign in 2016 and, began to help with his re-election effort in October 2020. Three days before Election Day, the brief contends, Bannon told a private gathering of supporters that despite the outcome of the race, Trump would simply declare victory. “That doesn’t mean he’s the winner,” Bannon said. “He’s just going to say he’s the winner.” Bannon is serving a four-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify to the House Jan. 6 committee. Bannon also seemed to play a role in bringing on the lawyer Rudy Giuliani to spearhead . Trump’s attempts to challenge the results of the election in court. Bannon appears to have played a larger role than was previously known in another of the former president’s schemes: the effort to pressure Vice President Mike Pence into blocking or delaying certification of Joseph Biden's Electoral College victory at the Capitol on Jan. 6.
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