After the 2020 election, as his bid to hold on to power grew increasingly desperate, Donald Trump pressed Republican Party Chair Ronna McDaniel to help promote a false claim that voting machines in Michigan had been manipulated. McDaniel balked. She had spoken to the state’s House speaker, Lee Chatfield, a Republican, who told her the claim was “fucking nuts.” That detail was among a dossier of evidence unfurled Wednesday in a newly released legal brief by special counsel Jack Smith. The 165-page filing offers the most detailed look at Smith’s case charging Trump with orchestrating multiple criminal conspiracies in his failed quest to subvert Joe Biden’s victory, Politico reports. The filing is replete with new revelations about the alleged scheme drawn from interviews with key figures such as former Vice President Mike Pence and Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results,” Smith’s prosecutors wrote. “The through line of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
Though Trump's trial in the case had been scheduled to begin earlier this year, the Supreme Court delayed the proceedings by eight months while it weighed Trump’s claim that he was immune from the charges. Then the high court’s ruling endorsed a sweeping view of presidential immunity and tasked the trial judge, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, with reviewing Smith’s evidence to determine whether any of it should be barred from consideration. That process could take months to resolve and likely result in yet another trip to the Supreme Court. Now, Smith’s new filing is squarely aimed at showing that Trump's conduct should not be protected by immunity since it was done in his capacity as a candidate for office — not in his official capacity as president. Smith submitted the sprawling legal brief to Chutkan last week, but it remained sealed until Wednesday.
Comments