“I said, ‘Wow,’ about 25 times in a quick reading of this document,” Tribe told CNN’s Erin Burnett on Wednesday.
“I bet there are another 25 that I will encounter,” he added.
Tribe said there are “lots of jaw-dropping things” in the filing.
Such as Trump’s “so what?” response to the news that his vice president, Mike Pence, had been rushed from the Senate during the U.S. Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021 and Trump’s comment to relatives that, “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election, you still have to fight like hell.”
Coming one day after the vice presidential debate, the filing is a devastating rebuttal of Republican Sen. JD Vance’s Orwellian effort to turn the horrible and violent events of January 6 into just another step in the peaceful transfer of power. “On January the 20th, what happened?” Vance said during the debate in an effort to push past the violent Capitol riot on Jan. 6, 2021. “Joe Biden became the president. Donald Trump left the White House.”
This accounting was, as the New York Times observes, “short a few details — the violence, the deaths and injuries, the alleged criminal scheming, the ‘Hang Mike Pence’ of it all.”
Whatever else it is, Smith’s filing is not short on details. As a result, it makes an important contribution to our collective understanding of how close we came to losing our democracy and of Trump’s central role in the coordinated efforts carried out by the sycophants, courtiers, and corrupt lawyers who did his bidding. Reading it is like returning to the scene of a disaster. We are invited to relive the trauma. Sometimes that is what being a citizen in a democracy demands —especially so in the age of Trump.
Rudy Giuliani allegedly sent a text message begging Michigan lawmakers to overturn the 2020 election result – but got the wrong number.
The embattled former New York City mayor, who is also facing trial accused of conspiring to subvert Arizona’s 2020 presidential election results, has a long history of technological gaffes and humiliating mishaps.
The latest embarrassing example was detailed in special counsel Jack Smith’s legal briefing, filed in federal court in Washington DC on Wednesday, which outlines the federal election interference case against Donald Trump in the most thorough detail to date.
Giuliani
is not named in the filing but is presumed to be “co-conspirator 1”,
accused of launching state-by-state efforts to convince Republican
lawmakers to support Trump’s mandate of overturning the 2020 election
result.
A big part of the case against Trump is making clear that he and those around him knew their plan was corrupt — that it wasn’t just them really believing the election was stolen.
One detail in particular stands out.
The filing cites a scene from Nov. 4, 2020, at the TCF Center in Detroit. It says a colleague of a Trump campaign official and an alleged co-conspirator informed them that a batch of votes that heavily favored Joe Biden was apparently correct.
The alleged co-conspirator, whose description matches that of Trump’s Election Day operations chief Mike Roman, allegedly responded by saying: “find a reason it isnt” and “give me options to file litigation.” Then in a mangled message, the co-conspirator seems to suggest that they are not concerned if the claims are frivolous — “even if itbis.”
The colleague suggested such things could lead to a repeat of the so-called Brooks Brothers riot, a fraught scene in South Florida during the contested 2000 presidential election.
The Trump campaign official and co-conspirator allegedly responded: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
It’s an eerily prescient comment, given that just two months later, Trump’s false and often nonsensical claims of voter fraud would lead to a large-scale riot at the U.S. Capitol. (It’s worth noting that whether the Brooks Brothers riot was actually particularly violent is disputed.)
It could certainly help prosecutors drive home the point that the people behind the effort to contest the 2020 election didn’t actually care about the evidence and whether they were right; they just wanted to sow doubt.
2. ‘So what?’: Trump’s seeming lack of concern
The filing fills out some key details of what happened after the Capitol riot touched off on Jan. 6, 2021. It repeatedly reinforces the idea that Trump was well aware of what was taking place even as he — for hours — resisted reining in his supporters and even launched an attack on Vice President Mike Pence at 2:24 p.m.
The timeline here was filled out somewhat by the House Jan. 6 select committee, but the filing contains even more detail.
It says that around 1:30 p.m., Trump settled into the dining room next to the Oval Office and “spent the afternoon there reviewing Twitter on his phone,” while Fox News played on TV. It suggests that prosecutors have forensic evidence from the activity logs on Trump’s phone to back up that he was “consistently” using his Twitter application.
A footnote says that, before Trump’s tweet attacking Pence, advisers told him that “there’s a riot, and there are people inside the Capitol Building,” and “someone’s gotten into the Capitol.”
The filing goes on to say that Trump was alone when he tweeted at 2:24 p.m. that Pence “didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution.” (Rioters at one point chanted for Pence’s hanging, and Pence had been evacuated at 2:13 p.m.)
All of those are crucial to establishing that Trump had reason to believe Pence could be in danger and that he knew things had gotten out of hand, and that he pressed forward with attacking Pence anyway. It also builds on extensive evidence suggesting Trump declined for hours to do something about the violence. He didn’t tell people to go home until 4:17 p.m.
But perhaps the most vivid new detail comes from shortly after Trump’s Pence tweet. It says an aide relayed a phone call to Trump stating that Pence had been taken to a secure location. The aide hoped Trump would do something to help, according to the filing.
Instead, Trump allegedly responded, “So what?”
It’s hardly the first evidence that Trump might have been indifferent to Pence’s fate and might have even seen utility in the unrest when it came to his efforts to overturn the election. But it might be among the most striking pieces of evidence on that front.
In mid-December 2020, Trump spoke with Republican National Committee chairwoman Ronna McDaniel and "asked her to publicize and promote a private report that had been released on December 13 that purported to identify flaws" in the use of voting machines in Antrim County, Michigan.
She refused, telling Trump that she had already discussed the report with Michigan's Speaker of the House, "who had told her the report was inaccurate."
McDaniel conveyed to Trump the Michigan speaker's "exact assessment: the report was f******* nuts," the filing states.
Regardless, Trump continued to claim that the election in Michigan and other states had been rigged in Biden's favor, the document notes.
'It Doesn't Matter if You Won Or Lost': Trump's Pep Talk to Family
Trump was traveling with his family on the presidential helicopter Marine One with First Lady Melania, his daughter Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, after the election. Also on board was an unnamed White House official who was assistant to the president and the director of Oval Office operations.
The White House official is willing to testify that Trump told his family: "It doesn't matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell."
The White House official "witnessed an unprompted comment that the defendant made to his family members in which the defendant suggested that he would fight to remain in power regardless of whether he had won the election," the prosecution document states.
The document goes to great lengths to paint the conversation as a private one. That is because the entire case had to be rewritten to comply with the Supreme Court's July 1 ruling on presidential immunity, which gave Trump broad protection from prosecution for official acts.
The document alleges that the conversation was "plainly private," even though Ivanka Trump and Kushner were White House advisors at the time.
"The defendant made the comment to his family members, who campaigned on his behalf and served as private advisors (in addition to any official role they may have played)," the document states.
Chutkan added: "Not only is that focus [on political rhetoric] unresponsive and unhelpful to the court, but it is also unbefitting of experienced defense counsel and undermining of the judicial proceedings in this case.
"Defendant has had an opportunity to make his case that his prosecution is improperly motivated. Future filings should be directed to the issues before the court."
“It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election," Trump allegedly said at some point after the election. "You still have to fight like hell.”
The filing cites these comments - reported by an unnamed assistant who overheard Trump speaking to his family - as evidence he was trying to overturn the result.
And the document says Trump laid the groundwork for challenging the election even before polling day.
It alleges the Republican had been told that the results would not be known on the day that most Americans voted - but that he might have an early edge before rival Democrats benefited from mail-in voting, which took longer to count.
Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, many voters had voted by mail.
Trump allegedly told advisers that he would "simply declare victory before all the ballots were counted and any winner was projected".
The former president's allies were clear on what that meant, according to the filing.
"He's going to declare victory. That doesn't mean he's the winner, he's just going to say he's the winner," a Trump adviser is quoted telling a private gathering of his supporters.
The prosecutors allege that Trump incited the 6 January Capitol riot by telling a crowd "many of the same lies he had been telling for months".
In a speech in Washington that morning, Trump "made clear that he expected his supporters to take action", according to the filing.
Mr Smith has made this allegation before, but he now contends that Trump fired up supporters as a political candidate, not president, and the speech was part of a rally.
His team argues that Trump "directed his supporters to go to the Capitol and suggested he would go with them" to provoke further action.
Then, Trump and his allies allegedly sought to "exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol" to try to delay the election certification.
Trump watched the riot unfold on Twitter and Fox News, says the filing, citing information from his phone and former White House staff. He also allegedly used social media to target Pence and repeatedly "refused" advisers' requests to "issue a calming message and make efforts to stop the riot".
Tim Walz: January 6th was not Facebook ads. And I think a revisionist history on this. Look, I don't understand how we got to this point, but the issue was that happened. Donald Trump can even do it. And all of us say there's no place for this. It has massive repercussions. This idea that there's censorship to stop people from doing, threatening to kill someone, threatening to do something, that's not censorship. Censorship is book banning. We've seen that. We've seen that brought up. I just think for everyone tonight, and I'm going to thank Senator Vance. I think this is the conversation they want to hear, and I think there's a lot of agreement. But this is one that we are miles apart on. This was a threat to our democracy in a way that we had not seen. And it manifested itself because of Donald Trump's inability to say, he is still saying he didn't lose the election. I would just ask that. Did he lose the 2020 election?
JD Vance: Tim, I'm focused on the future. Did Kamala Harris censor Americans from speaking their mind in the wake of the 2020 COVID situation?
Tim Walz: That is a damning. That is a damning non answer.
-
Amna Nawaz:
We're learning previously undisclosed details tonight about former President Donald Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
A newly unsealed 165-page court filing from the Department of Justice argues the former president should still face trial even after the U.S. Supreme Court ruled presidents have immunity for official acts.
NPR's Carrie Johnson and former U.S. attorney Mary McCord are following the latest developments. They join me now.
Welcome to you both.
So, Carrie, what do we know about why this filing was unsealed now by Judge Tanya Chutkan, and what stood out to you as you made your way through it?
-
Carrie Johnson, NPR:
Yes, the Justice Department made this filing in response to what the Supreme Court did this past summer.
The Supreme Court ruled that Trump and future presidents do enjoy substantial immunity from prosecution for official acts. But the special counsel, Jack Smith, and his team maintain that Trump was acting as a political candidate and not the president of the United States when he allegedly attempted to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
And this court filing today was filed under seal a short while ago. There's been some back-and-forth about how much the public should be able to see. And just this afternoon, Judge Tanya Chutkan mostly sided with prosecutors and released this filing with some redactions.
There are some new details in here based on grand jury testimony and notes that people like former Vice President Mike Pence took about his interactions with former President Donald Trump. There's some really interesting mentions of notes that Pence took about this all being up to Pence in the later part of 2020 and early 2021 as people prepared to count the electoral votes on January 6.
And there's some new detail from prosecutors, who maintain that Trump himself was in the dining room near the Oval Office tweeting on January 6 as Mike Pence was in danger from rioters in the Capitol. And Trump allegedly said to an aide who asked him about all this: "So what?"
So there's a lot of new color and vivid detail about Trump's alleged actions and his state of mind and his knowledge in those waning weeks of 2020 and early 2021.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Mary, we knew this was an argument that Jack Smith was going to lay out, saying, even though Trump was holding the official office of president, his scheme, as he writes in the filing — quote — "was a fundamentally private one."
Just broadly speaking, how does he make that case here and how compelling a case is that?
-
Mary McCord, Former Justice Department Official:
He goes through all of the different facets of the scheme the pressure on state legislatures, the pressure on his own vice president, the efforts to orchestrate the fraudulent electors scheme, and his comments not only at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, but in the lead-up to that, including public speeches and tweets.
And he — and Jack Smith emphasizes at every step how many private actors, private attorneys, and advisers, including some of his co-conspirators, were involved in so many of these efforts. He also makes the point about there not being executive branch officials involved in these various efforts.
And he also adds, I think, some really interesting details, to go to Carrie's point about showing his capacity as a candidate. He adds details about, when he's pressuring state legislatures, for example, and state government officials, he is, for one, only pressuring Republicans. He never calls, for example, the Michigan Democratic governor or secretary of state to complain about election fraud.
He only pressures Republicans. And in those states that are led by Democrats, he instead pressures state legislatures. He constantly refers only to his own race when he talks about fraud in the election and never to the election more generally. So, in other words, claims of election integrity, you would expect to be calling into question a number of different facets of the election, but, instead, he focused only on himself.
So, Jack Smith really does paint quite a vivid picture throughout not only the first part of this motion, which includes this extensive factual recitation, but particularly in his legal analysis and his application of the law, the law that the Supreme Court laid down in Trump v. United States, to the facts of this case.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Carrie, I want to underscore here that moment you briefly mentioned about Mr. Trump's reaction to learning that his vice president had been taken to a secure location. Here is what is actually written out in the filing related to that.
Jack Smith writes that: "Upon receiving a phone call, learning that Pence had been taken to a secure location, a redacted person rushed to the dining room to inform the defendants in hopes the defendant would take action to ensure Pence's safety. Instead, after he delivered the news, the defendant," in this case, former President Trump, "looked at him and said only: 'So what?'"
What else do we learn from this, Carrie, about the many efforts Vice President Pence made to offer then-President Trump an off-ramp from these false claims of election fraud?
-
Carrie Johnson:
Yes, we learned a lot about conversations that Pence had with Trump, as well as Pence's aides, who met with some of Trump's alleged co-conspirators, people we believe to be former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani, law professor John Eastman, and others who were advancing these bogus claims.
And after they tried all kinds of other efforts in the courts and with the states, they basically failed at all of those things, and it came down for them to Mike Pence. And so they placed enormous pressure on Pence, tried to signal that he had the power to overturn the will of millions of voters.
And Pence wasn't buying it. Nor was one of his legal aides who's testified before the house January 6 Committee. And we get a lot of detail about that. Pence basically says to Trump, why don't you try again? Take this — sit this one out. You can try again in 2024. And Trump and his top aides were just not having it.
In fact, Trump called Pence on January 5 and the morning of January 6 asked him to be tough. And Pence was under enormous pressure, as we saw in that period, but, still, he held firm and refused to go along with this alleged scheme.
-
Amna Nawaz:
Mary, there are some newly disclosed details in here, some newly confirmed details. Much of it was also known from the results of the January 6 hearings. But the big question is, now what?
What kind of impact will this filing have on the case moving forward?
-
Mary McCord:
Right.
So now it will be Mr. Trump's legal counsel's turn to file a response to this and make arguments in opposition to Jack Smith's arguments.
So he has argued that, for each facet of the scheme, Mr. Trump's conduct — well, first of all, for his pressure on his vice president, where the Supreme Court said that could — that's official, they have made a showing and an argument that they can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing through the evidence that prosecution for this illegal pressure on Mike Pence would not create any danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
For every other category, he argues that acts are private and not official. And even if the court were to find they were official, again, he can rebut the presumption of immunity by showing prosecution would have no danger of intrusion the functions of the presidency.
And this is something that Justice Amy Coney Barrett, in her concurring opinion, she pointed out some areas that she thought were private and said if she had — she thought the majority should have said so in its opinion, and some areas where she thought the presumption was rebutted.
-
Amna Nawaz:
That is former U.S. attorney Mary McCord and NPR's Carrie Johnson joining us tonight.
Thank you to you both.
“I don’t usually gasp at things,” said MSNBC legal analyst Lisa Rubin during an appearance with host Nicole Wallace on Wednesday on her show “Deadline: White House," but added, “We are learning facts that weren’t previously known to us.”
“I’ll read first what made Lisa Rubin gasp. Why make everybody wait?” Wallace said before going on to read from page 142 of the massive document, including a portion where Trump reportedly responded with, “So what?” when delivered the news that Mike Pence was taken to a secure location because of fears over his safety.
“The cavalierness with which Donald Trump received that news certainly is news to me,” Rubin said, adding that the new court filing contains more information than what has previously been released by the Jan. 6 committee investigation. “There is a whole lot of new content here Nicole and that is just one part of it.”
MSNBC legal analyst Andrew Weissman took it a step further when he called Trump’s actions after the 2020 election and in the lead-up to Jan. 6 the most serious crime “in American history.”
“What you have here is chapter and verse over and over again about an effort, a conspiracy – a criminal conspiracy – to thwart the will of the American electorate,” Weissman, a former FBI general counsel, told Wallace. “There is no more serious crime in American history than that.”
The lightly redacted filing argues that Trump’s scheme to use bogus election fraud claims to stop Biden from taking office “was fundamentally a private one” and did not involve “official conduct.” If the courts accept that argument, the indictment could survive the expansive presidential “immunity” standard invented by the Supreme Court in its controversial July 1 decision.
But regardless of the fate of Smith’s legal case, the motion matters politically. It bolsters the argument that Trump’s disregard for the Constitution, democracy, and the rule of law leave him unfit to return to office. And it functions as a reminder for distractible voters about the seriousness of the charges against the first election loser in American history to incite violence in bid to retain power.
Trump’s lawyers fought unsuccessfully in court to block release of the motion based on the claim that it could affect the election, an argument Chutkan, who has repeatedly said she does consider Trump’s status as a presidential candidate to be relevant to her proceedings, rejected. Smith also filed an appendix that includes FBI interviews, grand jury testimony, and other evidence, which remains sealed, though parts of that could also be made public before election day.
More evidence could come out in coming days. A hefty appendix accompanying Wednesday’s filing remains under seal, and the judge has asked both sides to weigh in on how much of it should be made public. Among the documents in the appendix are grand jury transcripts and notes from FBI interviews conducted during the yearslong investigation.
This is not a test. This is your emergency broadcast system announcing the commencement of the Annual Purge, sanctioned by the U.S. Government. Commencing at the siren, any and all crime, including murder, will be legal for 12 continuous hours.
That’s how “The Purge,” an annual —and thankfully fictional, at least for now — event held in a dystopian 2040 America is announced in a sequel of the long-running film series called, fittingly, The Purge: Election Year. The run of action horror films first launched in the early 2010s has become something of a B-movie sensation. Its pretense about a troubled America that tries controlled mayhem to stave off non-stop anarchy surely alarms some viewers — and thrills others. One thing I’m pretty sure about is that the producers didn’t mean for The Purge movies to serve as a policy white paper.
And yet here was Donald Trump, ex-president and GOP nominee for the last three elections, telling a smallish rally crowd in Erie, Pa. on Sunday afternoon that if returned to the White House, he will write his own sequel to The Purge — treating a violent Hollywood murder flick like it was the lost 31st chapter of Project 2025. The plot twist is that in Trump’s remake, everyday folks aren’t committing the crimes, but instead getting a whupping from an all-powerful police state.
- YouTubeyoutu.be
“See, we have to let the police do their job.” Trump said, even if “they have to be extraordinarily rough.” That was the start of a long, hard-to-follow ramble in which the Republican candidate claimed to have seen TV images of shoplifters walking out of stores with refrigerators or air conditioners on their backs — for which he blamed the permissive left. Trump’s solution would be “one really violent day” by the cops. Or even just “one rough hour. And I mean real rough. The word will be out. And it will end immediately...”
Well, as you can imagine, Trump’s call for a National Day of Violence — many commentators on X/Twitter compared it to an American Kristallnacht — caused an immediate frenzy. CBS News interrupted Patrick Mahomes, Travis Kelce, and the Kansas City Chiefs for a special report: “Trump’s Day of Violence.” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn ran down the newsroom’s iconic red stairs and screamed at his top lieutenants to rip up tomorrow’s front page. And...
And, who am I kidding with this tired bit? Of course those things never happened. Most news organizations did mention the Trump rant — it was hard to ignore — but treated it as the umpteenth instance of Trump being Trump, and not as a dangerous escalation of national rhetoric. The future 2024 Word of the Year — sanewashing — came back this weekend in a big way among the handful of media critics exasperated at the lack of urgency.
“Trump constantly saying extreme, racist, violent stuff can’t always be new,” the New Republic’s Michael Tomasky wrote in an essay. “But it is always reality. Is the press justified in ignoring reality just because it isn’t new? Are we not allowed to consider his escalations as dangerous, novel developments in and of themselves? And should we not note the coincidence that his remarks seem more escalatory as the pressures of the campaign mount?”
America — and especially the media — should take Trump’s rants seriously and literally.
Tomasky and others noted that Trump’s hateful weekend comments about immigrants were just as troubling as his endorsement of violence. At a Saturday rally in the ironically named Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin (ironic because Trump hates chiens, or dogs), Trump unleashed a flurry of the kind of dehumanizing language that typically precedes ethnic cleansing. “I will liberate Wisconsin from this mass migrant invasion of murderers, rapists, hoodlums, drug dealers, thugs, and vicious gang members,” the GOP nominee claimed. He called migrants “animals,” and, most bizarrely, claimed that they “will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.”
Sanewashing? “Trump pounds immigration message after Harris’ border visit,” was the headline in Axios, while Bloomberg tweeted that “Donald Trump sharpened his criticism on border security in a swing-state visit, playing up a vulnerability for Kamala Harris.” Really? Trump’s words sounds more like they were sharpened in the flames of a cross at a KKK rally than any kind of serious policy. Is it a vulnerability for Harris that her speeches about the border don’t sound like they were drafted by Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels? What different election are these journalists watching than the one that’s actually happening?
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