Posted on 10/03/2024 3:15:26 PM PDT by RandFan
Trump showed disregard for Pence’s safety
It was previously known that Trump showed little regard for the safety of Vice President Mike Pence as a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol, but two new details revealed in Smith’s filing underlined that fact.
On Jan. 6, 2021, as rioters breached the Capitol in an apparent attempt to stop Congress’s certification of the Electoral College results, Trump took to Twitter — now known as X.
He condemned Pence for lacking “courage” because he refused to disrupt the certification by rejecting the official electoral votes for Biden in favor of certifying false slates of electors that would have swung the election in Trump’s favor.
In the weeks leading up to Jan. 6, Trump and his allies mounted a pressure campaign against Pence to convince him that he had authority to use his role as president of the Senate to block the election results.
The social media post — which Smith revealed in the filing was sent by Trump as he sat alone in his White House dining room, after he became aware the Capitol had been breached — was blasted out at the same time Pence was evacuated from his Senate office, with angry rioters nearby.
When an aide alerted Trump that the vice president had been taken to a secure location, he replied only, “So what?”
The new details add to a trove of evidence underscoring Trump’s apathy toward his vice president’s safety that day. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson also told the now-disbanded Jan. 6 committee that Mark Meadows said Trump was flippant when told that crowds assembled near the Capitol were chanting “Hang Mike Pence.”
As former White House attorney Pat Cipollone approached the Oval Office to share that news, he bumped into Meadows.
“And Mark had responded something to the effect of, ‘You heard him, Pat, he thinks Mike deserves it. He doesn’t think they’re doing anything wrong,’” Hutchinson testified.
Trump’s knowledge of false election claims The filing expands on earlier allegations from prosecutors that Trump was well aware that his claims the election was stolen were false.
They write that Trump was given “the unvarnished truth” about losing the election but continued to make false claims despite being told they were untrue by close campaign advisers.
Multiple aides told him he would be unable to mount successful legal challenges to the election and warned that Trump would be unable to prove his allegations in court.
“The details don’t matter,” Trump is said to have responded.
Other portions of the filing note Trump and allies “repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day” and “made up figures from whole cloth.”
That includes baseless claims Trump promoted about noncitizens and dead people voting in elections.
Pence-Trump conversations
The filing fleshes out Pence’s pushback to Trump’s sustained campaign to get the vice president to buck his ceremonial duty to certify the election results.
Some examples are pulled from Pence’s book, including that Trump shouldn’t think of the election “as a loss – just an intermission” and that after pursuing all their legal options, they would need to “take a bow.”
The filing notes that during a call to Trump to wish him a merry Christmas on Dec. 25, Trump had sought to pressure him to reject his obligation to certify the votes, and Pence told him, “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.”
But prosecutors also secured five pages of Pence’s contemporaneous notes from his conversation with Trump and attorney John Eastman, who were pushing him to disregard the results.
During that meeting, Trump apparently said, “When there’s fraud, the rules get changed,” telling Pence to “be bold” and that “this whole thing is up to” him.
Trump also told Pence that he had the “r[igh]t to do whatever you want to do” and again falsely claimed to have won various states by hundreds of thousands of votes.
“The meeting concluded with Pence – firm and clear – telling the defendant, ‘I’m not seeing this argument working,’” the filing states.
Chaos at the polls
In the weeks after the election, Trump’s team sought to “create chaos” at polling places where votes were still being tabulated, Smith revealed in the filing.
One member of the campaign, unnamed and deemed a co-conspirator by prosecutors, allegedly attempted to create “confusion” at a Detroit polling center Nov. 4, when it became apparent that votes were increasingly going to Biden.
When a colleague at the center said as much, the Trump campaign employee told them to “find a reason it isn’t” going Biden’s way, even if it is, and give him “options to file litigation,” according to the filing.
The colleague suggested unrest would follow, to which the campaign employee replied, “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
Ronna McDaniel’s role
Details about the role of Ronna McDaniel — who chaired the Republican National Committee at the time — in the aftermath of the election also emerged in Smith’s new court papers.
During a meeting with Michigan GOP leaders, Trump dialed McDaniel into the call, despite her request not to participate on the advice of legal counsel who warned it could be viewed as lobbying, per the filing.
A month later, Trump spoke with McDaniel and asked her to promote a private report that claimed to identify flaws in the use of voting machines in a Michigan county. She resisted, telling the former president that she had discussed it with Michigan’s House Speaker, then Lee Chatfield (R), who gave a stark assessment: The report was “f‑‑‑ing nuts.”
A bit of a long screed as you can imagine.
But we shouldn't let them (re-)write history.
The Supreme Court already made their ruling on this matter. So I consider this case to be closed. The Left can accuse Trump million things. Ultimately, nothing will happen.
I don’t really think that these two pixies writing for “Da Swamp” were really that concerned about Pence’s safety on Jay Six Day.
Have they really? Definitively? I ask because the SCOTUS has stabbed Trump and conservatives (and portions of the middle) repeatedly the past decade+.
To the Hill. Oh, please! STFU with your rehashed repackaged claims and attempts to redefine what a ‘sitting President in office’ still is. January 20......
I don’t believe anything I see or hear from the Dem goons. Whether judges or prosecutors they’re all a bunch of partisan hacks.
Desperate
Quite a read, that.
Do people ever refer to it as The Shill?
The Democrats are just really afraid they’re going to lose this election. They’re throwing everything against the wall to see if anything sticks.
If I’m a Dem, it’s a waste of time. Better off to regroup with Gavin Newsom in 2028.
They’re not the brightest lights on the Christmas tree...
We the people know the truth.
A reckoning is in store for the cheaters and their minority backing.
Drain the swamp set things straight get rid of the problem.
You’re right. The woke crap is why they’re stuck with their DEI candidate in Kamala Harris.
What Trump thought and said within The White House environment about actions done by others a mile or so away was not a crime.
What Trump thought and said within The White House environment about disloyal and cowardly RINOs on Capitol Hill was not a crime.
I’m not going to read their lies.
Some FReepers think we need to study enemy lies. I disagree.
There is nothing to understand - everything they say is 100% predictable and 100% nonsense.
The chaos on January 6th could have been avoided if the judiciary at the state levels had done their legal duty and allowed a fair presentation of the evidence of voting irregularities in multiple states.
Instead, they held that the judiciary should not get involved in political disputes as they did in Florida in the Bush/Gore election. The left continues to believe the Supreme Court stole the election for Bush by rejecting the Florida Supreme Court intervention in the process.
This precedent gave judges the cover to rule that plaintiffs in voting disputes don’t have “standing” unless they are the actual injured candidate. They kicked the can down the road to Jan 6th.
The entirely legal effort on Jan 6th was not to “overturn” the election but to force the state legislatures in disputed states to do what the courts refused to do and look at the evidence of voting irregularities. Trump’s people believed if this were presented honestly, the states would hopefully do their duty to decide the election by democratic means when they saw that the vote-counting process was illegal and not certifiable by the SoSs of their state. This was a previously defined constitutional backstop to prevent grossly corrupted popular elections.
What the gaslighting left will never understand is that many people know the truth and only want to have their day in court before a fair jury. The latent sense of injustice and mistrust has lingered since 2020 and will continue until the disinfectant of sunlight is applied to this sad episode in America’s history.
Trump only has to answer for things he said and did, none of which was unlawful.
Trump had a reasonable expectation that when a lawyer is told to do something that it would be done according to applicable law.
“previously defined constitutional backstop”
That backstop had to be exercised by mid-December. By January 6th, it was too late. By December 15th, I lost all hope with respect to Trump and the election.
I have a very low opinion of Smith’s legal skills.
I don’t know why Garland would have hired him.
Indeed. Since he was POTUS at the time, how could he be questioning the election results as a private citizen?
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