Judge unseals Jack Smith’s evidence dump against Trump weeks out from election: ‘Make them riot’

Story by Caitlin Doornbos, Ryan King. October 2, 2024.

Trump cries, ‘I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID!’1 as judge unseals Jack Smith’s evidence dump against ex-prez weeks out from election.

Trump responded to the unsealing of the filing by raging on Truth Social: “FOR 60 DAYS PRIOR TO AN ELECTION, THE DEPARTMENT OF INJUSTICE IS SUPPOSED TO DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING THAT WOULD TAINT OR INTERFERE WITH A CASE. THEY DISOBEYED THEIR OWN RULE IN FAVOR OF COMPLETE AND TOTAL ELECTION INTERFERENCE. I DID NOTHING WRONG, THEY DID! THE CASE IS A SCAM, JUST LIKE ALL OF THE OTHERS, INCLUDING THE DOCUMENTS CASE, WHICH WAS DISMISSED!”1

“[H]e is a person who is trying — and he works for Kamala and he works for Joe,” the GOP nominee added. “This was a weaponization of government, and that’s why it was released 30 days before the election.” “And it’s nothing new in there, by the way. Nothing new.”

Trump accused the Biden-Harris administration of appointing Smith “to screw up the election for the Republican Party,” and he said the filing was unsealed for the same reason.

“They should have never allowed the information to come before the public, but they did that because they want to hurt you before the election,” he said. “The public doesn’t buy it.”

In the filing unsealed Wednesday, prosecutors argued at length that Trump’s alleged actions pressuring Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the election were conducted in a private, unofficial manner and are therefore exempt from presidential immunity. In one example, Smith argued that a Jan. 4, 2021, Trump meeting with Pence and one of his personal attorneys was considered private because the then-president dismissed his official White House counsel from the meeting.

“It is hard to imagine stronger evidence that conduct is private than when the president excludes his White House Counsel and only wishes to have his private counsel present,” the filing said.

Prosecutors also went through Trump’s and his allies’ efforts in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin to overturn his election loss, listing well-known incidents such as Trump’s infamous Jan. 2, 2021, call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger underscoring the need to “find” 11,780 votes and efforts to produce a fake slate of electors.

Smith also argued that Trump’s phone calls with governors and other elected officials in Georgia and Arizona were conducted as Trump the candidate, not Trump the president. The prosecutors drew this conclusion in part because Trump only called officials in swing states with GOP governors, having “made no efforts to contact equivalent individuals holding the same offices in Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania or Wisconsin, all of whom were Democrats.”

But what really sealed the deal, according to Smith, is that as president, Trump “had no official role in the process by which states appointed and ascertained their presidential electors,” therefore he could not be acting in his official capacity during the calls. “The content, form, and context of the defendant’s interactions with these state officials firmly establish that his conduct was unofficial,” he wrote.

“The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud,” Smith’s team insisted.

“He raised fraud claims in this context—about whether he could still win Arizona—not in the larger context of election integrity,” he wrote. “This call … was solely focused on the vote count in the presidential race and the defendant’s fraud claims.”

One unidentified Trump campaign employee did push hard for litigation in Democrat-run Michigan: When a colleague “suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the ‘Brooks Brothers Riot,’ a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election, P5 [the unnamed employee] responded, ‘Make them riot’ and ‘Do it!!!’”

  1. There Trump goes again again. Trump is having another Trumper Tantrum with his use of ALL CAPS.  2