A new filing from special counsel Jack Smith details “increasingly desperate” efforts by former President Donald Trump and his allies to allegedly overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
The 165-page filing — released Wednesday by Judge Tanya Chuktan — is the latest in Smith’s efforts to respond to the Supreme Court’s July ruling that presidents are shielded from official acts, but not unofficial ones. The decision kicked the indictment back down to lower courts to determine if Trump can still face charges in the government’s case, which accuses him of working to subvert the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“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 wrote in the filing. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”
Smith filed a superseding indictment in August charging Trump with four felonies: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct a federal proceeding, obstruction of a federal proceeding and conspiracy against rights.
Trump pleaded not guilty to the charges and has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
Smith charged in his filing that Trump, “working with a team of private co-conspirators,” was acting as a candidate — not the President of the United States — “when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”
Prosecutors alleged that Trump "resorted to crimes to try to stay in office" after his loss in 2020, according to the filing, launching "a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin" with "private co-conspirators."
Those crimes, Smith charged, included efforts to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the counting of the electoral votes on the afternoon of Jan. 6, 2021.
The filing includes details of conversations between Trump and Pence, including a private lunch the two had on Nov. 12, 2020, in which Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him, “don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors.
In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.
“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing.
But Trump “disregarded” Pence “in the same way he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, and that he disregarded officials in the targeted states — including those in his own party — who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false,” prosecutors wrote.
Trump’s “steady stream of disinformation” in the weeks after the election culminated in his speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, in which Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding,” prosecutors wrote.
In a statement on social media, Trump called the filing "falsehood-ridden" and "Unconstitutional" and baselessly alleged a coordinated effort to interfere with November's election.
"This entire case is a Partisan, Unconstitutional, Witch Hunt, that should be dismissed, entirely, just like the Florida case was dismissed!" Trump added.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.