What all Trump did during Jan 6 Capitol riots to stall 2020 election results: Details of Smith’s report

Former US President Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to overturn the results of the 2020 US presidential elections, federal prosecutors stated in a newly unsealed court filing. The prosecutors made the remarks while they were delivering arguments on why Trump should not be entitled to immunity.

The court filing was unsealed on Wednesday and was submitted by special counsel Jack Smith’s team, The Guardian reported. Smith approached the court following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity for former presidents. The 165-page filing is now touted as the last opportunity for the prosecutors to detail their case against Trump before the November 5 elections, where he will be racing for the White House against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Throughout the course of the legal tussle, Trump’s legal team have been employing a delaying strategy in several court cases against Trump. In the filing, the prosecutors laid out several allegations, including the one in which a White House staffer heard Trump tell family members that it did not matter if he won or lost the election, “You still have to fight like hell”.

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The newly-unsealed filling also cited previously unknown accounts offered by Trump’s closest aides in which the former president was portrayed as getting “increasingly desperate” to prevent losing his grip on the White House. The prosecutors involved in the case accused Trump of using “deceit to target every stage of the electoral process”.

“So what?” the filing quotes Trump as telling an aide after being alerted that his vice-president, Mike Pence, was in potential danger during the January 6 Capitol riots. “The details don’t matter,” Trump said, when told by an adviser that a lawyer who was mounting his legal challenges would not be able to prove the false allegations in court, the filing states.

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The filing also detailed a conversation between Trump and his erstwhile running mate Pence, including a private lunch the two had on 12 November 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him: “Don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors. In another private lunch, Pence urged the former reality TV star to accept the results of the elections and run again in 2024.

“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing. Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states – including those in his own party – who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.

“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one. When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” Smith’s team added.

It is pertinent to note that Trump had already pleaded not guilty to four criminal charges hurled against him in the case. The former president was accused of a conspiracy to obstruct the congressional certification of the election, defraud the US out of accurate results and interfere with Americans’ voting rights.

Smith’s team maintained that the filing would discuss new evidence, including transcripts of witness interviews and grand jury testimony, but much of that material would not be made public until a trial.

Trump’s team remains defiant

Meanwhile, Trump’s lawyers opposed allowing Smith to issue a sweeping court filing laying out their evidence. The lawyers maintained that “it would be inappropriate” to do so just weeks before the elections. Amid the chaos, Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung called the brief “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional” and repeated allegations that Smith and Democrats were “hell-bent on weaponizing the justice department in an attempt to cling to power”.

“The release of the falsehood-ridden, Unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American Democracy and interfere in this election," Cheung averred.

With inputs from agencies.