Trump “committed crimes” to overturn the 2020 election, the special counsel claims in an unsealed court document

Donald Trump launched a “private criminal operation” to undermine the 2020 US election and should not be protected by presidential immunity, special counsel Jack Smith said in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday, October 2.

Smith also provided new evidence of the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the election won by Democrat Joe Biden in a 165-page filing arguing for the continuation of the historic case against Trump.

Trump, 78, the Republican nominee in November’s White House election, was scheduled to stand trial in March but the case was frozen while his lawyers argued that a former president should be immune from prosecution. The Supreme Court ruled in July that an ex-president enjoys broad immunity from prosecution for official acts committed while in office, but can be prosecuted for unofficial acts.

Smith said in the filing, unsealed by District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is hearing the case, that Trump should not escape prosecution because “the defendant’s scheme was, at its core, a private criminal effort.”

“The defendant asserts that he is protected from prosecution for his criminal plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it involved official conduct,” Smith said. “Not like that.”

“Although the defendant was the sitting president during the charged conspiracies, his plan was essentially a private one.” Trump “resorted to crime to stay in office” as a candidate and not in his official capacity, he said the special investigator. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant embarked on a series of increasingly desperate schemes to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he lost,” he added.

Trump’s efforts allegedly included lying to state officials, forging fraudulent electoral votes and trying to get Vice President Mike Pence to block Congress from certifying Biden’s victory.

“When all else had failed,” the special counsel said, Trump sent an “angry mob” of supporters to the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, to disrupt the certification. According to Smith’s filing, a White House staffer told Trump during the Capitol riot on Jan. 6 that Pence had been moved to a secure location, to which the president responded, “So what?”

‘Crazy’

Smith said there was ample evidence that Trump knew his claims of voter fraud were false because close advisers told him so. The former president even dismissed some of his supporters’ far-fetched fraud allegations as “crazy,” he said. The special counsel said a former White House staffer will testify in court that he heard Trump tell his family members after the vote: “It doesn’t matter whether you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Trump said in a post on Truth Social after the file was unsealed: “Democrats are arming the Justice Department against me because they know I WIN.”

“This is egregious prosecutorial misconduct and should not have been made public immediately before the election,” he said. Chutkan has not set a date for a trial, but it will not take place before the Nov. 5 election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.

Trump is charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States and conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding – the session of Congress that was violently attacked by Trump supporters. The former president is also accused of disenfranchising US voters with his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

Trump was convicted in New York in May of 34 counts of falsifying business records to conceal hush money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels. He also faces charges in Georgia in connection with efforts to overturn the 2020 election.