The Striking Details That Jack Smith Used To Tighten His January 6 Case Against Trump

Special Counsel Jack Smith laid out his most detailed case yet in a filing unsealed Wednesday for why Trump can still be prosecuted in spite of the Supreme Court’s capacious immunity decision.

It’s partly a dare to the Supreme Court, asking it — assuming the matter works its way up again from Judge Tanya Chutkan’s chambers to the high court — to outright declare that Trump’s effort to thwart the 2020 election formed part of his official duties.

In so doing, Smith gave a more precise and detailed account of key moments in which Trump allegedly violated the law.

Critically, Smith provided tighter evidence in three specific areas:

• Trump allegedly knew that he had lost the 2020 election and chose to fight anyway.
• The aim of the attempt to delay certification of the election on January 6 was for leverage to “negotiate” a Trump victory, diverging from the way in which the U.S. has picked a President for more than two centuries.
• Trump and those around him saw and used violence as a means of winning the post-election fight.

Staying in the Fight

Both before and after the election, Smith alleges, Trump was determined to declare victory regardless of the outcome.

This is not surprising on its face — as early as 2016, Trump refused to commit to respecting the result of the election if he lost. It’s long been part of the Trump brand: he’ll fight even if he knows he’s wrong, just to keep fighting.

But Smith refines this in the filing with new details that suggest Trump’s view of the results was blithe disregard. As the former President allegedly told family members after the election, “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”

Before votes were being cast, Smith wrote, Trump told advisers that “he would simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”

There are a few moments in which Smith alleges that Trump boosted information that he knew to be false. Smith had earlier alleged that various public officials and Trump associates told the former President that claims of voter fraud were bogus. But the filing unsealed on Wednesday puts a finer point on it by showing, in at least one instance, that Trump reacted to nonsensical claims in the way that much of the country did: by calling them “crazy.”

That episode centers on Sidney Powell, the attorney who accused Hugo Chavez of stealing the election at an infamous mid-November press conference. The next day, Smith said, Trump put Powell on speakerphone during a call. He then muted it, and proceeded to call her claims “crazy” and make a “Star Trek” reference to what she was saying.

Trump later boosted lawsuits that Powell filed based on the same claims. Other officials around Trump were in the odd position of pushing back against claims that Trump may have understood were false.

At one point, Smith said, Trump demanded that RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel push an allegation that Michigan voting machines had been hacked. The speaker of the Michigan state house had already told McDaniel that the allegation was “fucking nuts.”

Negotiating a Victory

Smith also further defined what Trump attorneys envisioned as the purpose of convening slates of false electors and using them to delay the count.

In one example, attorney Ken Chesebro suggested to Rudy Giulani that Pence’s delay could be used as a means to “negotiate a solution to defeat Biden.” The idea would be to use the delay as a means of pressure, demonstrating that Congress was incapable of acting and thereby inviting the Supreme Court to step in and rule, theoretically, in Trump’s favor.

Nothing like this happened. But for Smith, it helps demonstrate that Trump went through a cascading series of plans for how to snatch victory from the jaws of an already-certain defeat.

It came up separately in Trump’s month-long campaign to pressure Pence into throwing out electoral votes for states that Trump lost. That, Smith said, took the form of tweets, cajoling, pressure, and threats, all of which created the impression among Trump supporters that Pence had the ability to change the result.

The Brooks Brothers Riot, Forever

Smith described the result of that failed pressure campaign as a “tinderbox” that ignited on January 6.

But he takes a broader view of Trump and violence in the filing.

To Smith, violence was always an option for Trump and those around him, something that could be used to force a victory if other options failed.

At the outset, Smith recounts an event that took place during vote-counting at Detroit’s TCF Center. There, an unidentified person told a Trump campaign staffer that a batch of votes was leaning heavily in Biden’s favor, and that the count was accurate.

“[F]ind a reason it isnt,” the campaign staffer purportedly replied, adding: “give me options to file litigation” and “even if itbis [sic].”

It’s Trump’s stop the steal campaign in miniature. At first, the staffer allegedly considers mendacity and legal options as means to victory. But when that fails, the next move is violence.

The unidentified person then suggested to the staffer that there might be violence similar to the 2000 Brooks Brothers riot. The staffer allegedly replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”

Smith characterized the Brooks Brothers riot itself as a “violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election.” It’s a telling aside.

It also mirrors how Smith described Trump’s actions on January 6.

During the speech on the Ellipse, Smith said, Trump knew that “he had only one last hope to prevent Biden’s certification as President: the large and angry crowd standing in front of him.”

Trump then sent his supporters, Smith said, to the Capitol in an effort to stop the electoral vote count. When a staffer told him that Mike Pence had managed to make it out of harm’s way, Trump allegedly replied: “So what?”