On October 2, 2024, Special Counsel Jack Smith filed the government’s motion for an immunity determination –Were Donald Trump’s acts done in his official capacity or as the government contends, “At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort.”
The 165-page brief, which is worth reading for a full understanding of Trump's conduct and culpability, succinctly lays out what the defendant Trump did and the alleged three conspiracies as follows:
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched 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 (the “targeted states”). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud. They used these lies in furtherance of three conspiracies: 1) a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); 2) a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election, and 3) a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.”
Click here for the full brief.
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