Donald Trump launched a “private criminal effort” to subvert the 2020 US election and should not be shielded by presidential immunity, Special Counsel Jack Smith said in a court filing unsealed on Wednesday.
Smith, in a 165-page motion arguing for the historic case against Trump to move forward, also provided new evidence of the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the election won by Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump, the Republican candidate in November’s White House election, had been scheduled to go on trial in March but the case was frozen while his lawyers argued that a former president should be immune from criminal prosecution.
The Supreme Court ruled in July that an ex-president has broad immunity from prosecution for official acts conducted while in office, but can be pursued for unofficial acts.
Smith, in the filing unsealed by District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is hearing the case, said Trump should not escape prosecution because “at its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort.”
“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” Smith said. “Not so.”
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”
Trump, acting as a candidate and not in his official capacity, “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the special counsel said.
“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost,” he said.
Trump’s efforts allegedly included lying to state officials, manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes and seeking to get Vice President Mike Pence to obstruct Congressional certification of Biden’s victory.
“When all else had failed,” the special counsel said, Trump directed an “angry crowd” of supporters to the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
– ‘Crazy’ –
Smith said there was abundant evidence that Trump knew his claims of electoral fraud were false because close advisers had told him so.
The former president even dismissed some of the most far-fetched fraud claims advanced by his supporters as “crazy,” he said.
Smith said Trump — frustrated with the failure of his election challenges — engaged “a private attorney who was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
The attorney, while not named in the filing, appeared to be former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani.
Chutkan has not set a date for a trial but it will not be held before the November 5 election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris.
Trump is accused of 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 seeking to disenfranchise 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 cover up hush money payments made to porn star Stormy Daniels.
He also faces charges in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
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