Special counsel Jack Smith revealed more allegations yesterday in former President Trump’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, including new details on the push in Michigan.
Among other allegations, Smith says that Trump privately acknowledged his possible loss with family members, said the details of his fraud claims “don’t matter” and reacted with ambivalence when told his vice president was potentially in danger.
Smith accuses members of the Trump campaign of intentionally sowing chaos at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were being counted that same day.
Smith alleges that a day after the election, a campaign employee told a colleague to “make them riot” when that employee thought a batch of votes favoring Joe Biden was about to be counted.
Smith also alleges that Trump and his allies publicly and privately pressured former Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield and Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey to contest the state’s election results, despite no detailed or legitimate claims of fraud.
Numerous audits throughout the state have found that Biden legitimately beat Trump by over 150,000 votes, including one led by Shirkey and Michigan Senate Republicans.
Jeffery Swartz, a former judge and a professor at Cooley Law School, says that Smith uses the actions related to Michigan to show one of the methods Trump tried to subvert public trust in the election results.
“What he’s saying basically is that these kinds of allegations, which had absolutely no merit whatsoever, were the basis under which allegations were made in federal court and publicly trying to deceive the public into believing that there was widespread fraud all over the country,” he said.
Swartz says that a defense of honest belief that the election was stolen may not help Trump should the case go to trial.
“He can claim all he wants to that he honestly believed that, but his honest belief must be reasonable, and that’s a jury issue,” he said.
Trump and his campaign have pushed back against the claims and cast the filing as politically motivated. Campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung said in a statement, “The release of the falsehood-ridden, unconstitutional J6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous debate performance is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine American democracy and interfere in this election.”
There is no evidence that Biden or Harris have influenced federal or state prosecution of trump.
The timing of the document’s release is in part due to Trump’s delay tactics which he employed to push most of his legal troubles beyond the November election, along with the Supreme Court’s summer decision on presidential immunity.
“He might contest that he should be held liable, that he is immune, but now it’s all in great detail in front of the public in October, just before the election,” Swartz said. “This is what he wanted — delay, delay, delay, and his delays have run out in front of Judge Chutkan now.”