Special Counsel Jack Smith discovered that Donald Trump’s team regarded his own MAGA supporters as easily manipulated individuals while they executed an “extraordinary criminal scheme” to reverse the outcome of the 2020 election.
Smith articulated his findings in a report published on Tuesday, which outlines his rationale for charging Trump with four counts for conspiring to impede the certification of the presidential election he lost to Joe Biden.
According to Smith, Trump’s team “misled” a group of devoted MAGA followers who were enlisted as fake electors in states won by Biden.
Many enthusiastic Trump supporters were informed, Smith stated, that they were enrolling as backup electors in the event that litigation led by Trump’s team proved triumphant.
However, Trump and his associates pressed then-Vice President Mike Pence to endorse a roster of fraudulent electors—which he declined to do.
“The co-conspirators misrepresented to Mr. Trump’s elector nominees in the targeted states by falsely asserting that their electoral votes would only come into play if ongoing legal challenges were resolved in Mr. Trump’s favor,” Smith’s report indicated.
Andrew Hitt, one of the bogus electors enlisted in Wisconsin, recounted to CBS News last year that Trump’s team had deceived him.
“Had I known what I know now, I wouldn’t have participated,” he said. “We were not informed about this alternate scheme or motive.”
Smith further stated that a member of Trump’s inner circle, during a conversation with Trump and then-Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel, “propagated a falsehood that the co-conspirators would exploit to secure the involvement of many of the fraudulent electors: that the votes of Mr. Trump’s electors would only be utilized if the litigation in their state was favorable to Mr. Trump.”
The special prosecutor clarified his belief that the primary accountability for the fraudulent electors scheme lies with Trump, who initiated the plan and “saw to it that it was executed by co-conspirators and campaign agents in the targeted states, while monitoring its developments.”
He also concluded that Trump had never genuinely believed—despite his public and private falsehoods to the contrary—that he had won the 2020 election, and opportunistically chose to “exploit” the violence that erupted during the January 6 insurrection because it benefitted his scheme to disrupt the certification.
“Mr. Trump was aware that there was no outcome-altering fraud in the 2020 election, acknowledging that many of the specific claims he made were false, and that he had lost the election,” Smith wrote, citing numerous sources.
[This last ‘conclusion’ by Smith remains highly-contested, with considerable – albeit circumstantial – evidence that a highly-organized and orchestrated campaign of vote fraud took place during the 2020 election, including but not limited to; unverified mail-in ballots mysteriously delivered to some precincts in the dead of night after counting had equally mysteriously ceased late on election night when Donald Trump’s lead was seemingly unassailable; poll watchers denied access to ballot counting; tracking of individuals engaged in ballot-stuffing captured by geolocation cellphone signals; video evidence of ballot-stuffing both in drop boxes and precincts; mass mail-in ballots authorised for certain states in violation of both state and federal law (most notably in Pennsylvania); transportation of many unverified mail-in ballots to key swing states seemingly coming from New Jersey (tracked by cellphone geolocation); and perhaps most insidiously, the total censorship by Big Tech and ‘mainstream’ media of any discussion, exposure, or investigation into allegations of fraud.]
Smith finished by asserting that the evidence gathered by his office would have been sufficient to secure a conviction of Trump at trial, but his election to a second term in the presidency made this a non-issue.
Whether through his deceit towards his supporters or the American public, Smith underscored that dishonesty was the enduring characteristic of Trump’s actions during the fraudulent electors scheme and the Capitol riot.
“The common thread of all of Mr. Trump’s criminal endeavors was deceit—deliberately false claims of election fraud—and the evidence indicates that Mr. Trump wielded these lies as a weapon to undermine a federal governmental function that is fundamental to the democratic process of the United States,” he articulated.
