11 damning details in Jack Smith's new brief in the Trump election case [View all]

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https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/02/jack-smith-trump-election-brief-details-00182287

From Trump’s fictitious stats about voter fraud to the FBI’s forensic analysis of Trump’s phone, prosecutors previewed how they would make their case at trial.

By Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein 10/02/2024 09:45 PM EDT

Much of Smith’s brief focused on Trump’s state of mind in the weeks leading up to the Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith described a slew of conversations suggesting that the then-president knew his claims of election fraud were spurious. And Smith laid out evidence that Trump’s sole objective was to stay in power — not, as he and his lawyers have claimed, to exercise legitimate authority over election integrity.

Prosecutors said they would prove at trial that Trump and his allies often made up statistics about voter fraud “from whole cloth.” For example, Trump and allies alleged that 36,000 noncitizens had cast ballots in Arizona, changing the figure to “a few hundred thousand” five days later, eventually revising it back to “bare minimum … 40 or 50,000,” then to 32,000 and back up to the original number of 36,000.

Prosecutors, who had more access to telephone records and emails than the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6, allege that Trump spoke to ally Steve Bannon by phone on Jan. 5 less than two hours before Bannon issued a prescient and provocative prediction on his War Room podcast that “all hell is going to break loose” on Jan. 6.

Trump sidelined his campaign lawyers on Nov. 13, 2020, with Bannon informing another Trump campaign adviser — and alleged co-conspirator — that Trump had replaced them in the pecking order with Rudy Giuliani. Bannon said he told Trump that without Giuliani in charge, “this thing is over.” “Trump is in to the end,” Bannon added, according to prosecutors.