A new unsealed court filing says Donald Trump "resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” after losing the 2020 US presidential election.
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Former US President Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” in a failed bid to cling to power after losing the 2020 election, federal prosecutors said in a court filing that was unsealed on Wednesday. It argues that the former president is not entitled to immunity from prosecution.
The filing was submitted by special counsel Jack Smith's team following a Supreme Court opinion that conferred broad immunity on former presidents for official acts they take in office, narrowing the scope of the prosecution charging Trump with conspiring to overturn the results of the election he lost to Democrat Joe Biden.
Although a months-long congressional investigation and the indictment itself have chronicled in stark detail Trump's efforts to undo the election, the filing cites previously unknown accounts offered by Trump's closest aides to paint a portrait of an “increasingly desperate” president who, while losing his grip on the White House, “used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”
The purpose of the brief is to convince US District Judge Tanya Chutkan that the offenses charged in the indictment are private, rather than official, acts and can therefore remain part of the indictment as the case moves forward.
Those include efforts to persuade former Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify the counting of the electoral votes on the afternoon of 6 January, 2021.
“Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith's team said. “Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the filing said.
Though the prospects of a trial are uncertain, particularly if Trump wins the presidency and a new attorney general seeks the dismissal of the case, the brief nonetheless functions as a roadmap for the testimony and evidence prosecutors would elicit before a jury.
It is now up to Chutkan to decide which of Trump's acts are official conduct for which Trump is immune from prosecution and which are, in the words of Smith's team, “private crimes” on which the case can proceed.