“Make Them Riot”: Newly Unsealed Filing Gives New Details Of Federal Election Conspiracy Case Against Donald Trump

deadline.com:

A newly unsealed filing reveals additional evidence in Special Counsel Jack Smith‘s election conspiracy case against Donald Trump, as the prosecutor argued that the former president “resorted to crimes to try and stay in office.” The filing details the extent to which a bevy of advisers, including Vice President Mike Pence, sought to convince Trump that his challenge to the 2020 presidential election would not succeed and that it lacked evidence, but the then-president went ahead with his election rigging claims anyway. “The evidence demonstrates that the defendant knew his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisers — acting not in an official capacity but in a private or campaign-related capacity — told him they were not true,” Smith wrote in the brief.

In one instance, according to the filing, a White House staffer overheard Trump tell family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election.

You still have to fight like hell.” Smith and his team wrote that at trial, they intended to show that, in some instances, Trump and his team “made up figures from whole cloth.” In another instance, an unidentified Trump aide, described only as a “campaign operative,” was told by a colleague at a Detroit, MI vote counting center that they thought a batch of ballots would be in Biden’s favor, the operative said to “find a reason it isn’t.” “When the colleague suggested that there was about to be unrest reminiscent of the Brooks Brothers riot, a violent effort to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election,” the campaign operative “responded, ‘Make them riot!’ and ‘Do it!'” Read the Trump election conspiracy filing.