The United States Federal Dept. of Justice reminds us that the guy running for President of the United States , again, as a convicted state criminal felon is up for another criminal trial in Federal Court….
A lengthy motion from special counsel Jack Smith was unsealed Wednesday, making public what prosecutors say is new evidence that former President Trump and his allies tried to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.
The big picture: U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the 165-page redacted motion, despite Trump’s opposition.
- In response to a recent Supreme Court decision on presidential immunity, Smith filed the motion seeking a determination Trump was acting as a private citizen and not as the president when he sought to overturn the 2020 election.
Read the filing in full, via DocumentCloud:
…
Special counsel Jack Smith outlined in a motion unsealed by a judge on Wednesday what he called former President Trump’s “increasingly desperate” efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results.
Why it matters: Trump and his legal team had opposed the motion, arguing it would interfere with the November election results. The filing unveils new details in connection to the Republican presidential nominee’s Jan. 6 case.
- U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan unsealed the redacted motion on Wednesday.
State of play: Smith in the motion wrote that Trump’s “scheme was a private criminal effort.” He emphasized throughout the document that the former president was acting in his capacity as a candidate, not a president.
- This is an apparent attempt by Smith to respond to the bombshell Supreme Court ruling earlier this year that said that presidents have immunity for “official acts.”
- “At its core, the defendant’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 wrote.
Zoom in: Smith also accused Trump of knowing “his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisors—acting not in an official capacity but in a private or campaign-related capacity—told him they were not true.”
- “At one point long after the defendant had begun spreading false fraud claims, a White House staffer traveling with [Trump], overheard him tell family members that ‘it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell,'” Smith wrote.
- Smith also outlined numerous instances of Trump’s former Vice President Mike Pence telling Trump that there was no evidence of fraud.
Update….
Trump response….
Former President Donald Trump called the unsealing of documents in his election interference case a “weaponization of the government” during an exclusive interview with NewsNation on Wednesday in Houston, Texas….
image…NBC News…
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