Trump case of January 6: Five key points in the latest lawsuit against the former president | Trials against Donald Trump

“Basically a private” system

The new court filing, which refers to Trump as “the defendant,” alleges that Trump’s plan that day was “fundamentally a private plan” and therefore related not to his duties as president but as a candidate for office .

It says: “The defendant claims that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal plan to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it involved official conduct.” Not so. Although the defendant was the sitting president during the charged conspiracies, his plan was essentially a private one.

“He made extensive use of private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and stood as a candidate for office in a private capacity.”

The filing addresses Trump’s use of private consultants on Election Day: “As Election Day approached November 4, the contest was too close to predict a winner and discussions about what the defendant should say publicly about the election , senior advisers suggested that the accused should exercise restraint in further counting. However, two private consultants advocated a different approach: (name redacted) and (name redacted) suggested that the defendant should simply declare victory. And at about 2:20 a.m., the defendant made a televised speech to a crowd of his campaign supporters in which he falsely claimed, without evidence or specificity, that there was fraud in the election and that he had won.”

On Jan. 4, the filing says, a White House lawyer was barred from a meeting where Trump sought to pressure Pence to help overturn the election results. Only a private attorney was present, the filing says: “It is difficult to imagine stronger evidence” that Trump’s conduct was private.

A presidential candidate alone in a dining room with Twitter and Fox News

Trump’s day on January 6 began at 1 a.m. with a tweet pressuring Pence to prevent the certification of the results. Seven hours later, at 8:17 a.m., Trump tweeted about it again. Shortly before his speech at the Ellipse, Trump called Pence and again urged him to “cause him to act unlawfully in the coming session” in which Pence would certify the election results. Pence refused.

At that point, the filing says, Trump “decided to reinsert remarks into his campaign speech at the Ellipse that targeted Pence for refusing to abuse his role in the certification.”

Trump gave his speech and the certification process began at the Capitol at 1 p.m.

Trump, meanwhile, “sat down in the dining room next to the Oval Office. He spent the afternoon there reviewing Twitter on his cell phone while Fox News’ coverage of the events at the Capitol played on the dining room television.”

From the dining room, Trump watched as a crowd of his supporters marched toward the Capitol. He had been there less than an hour when “at approximately 2:24 p.m.” Fox News reported that a police officer may have been injured and that “protesters … had entered the Capitol.”

“At 2:24 p.m. Trump tweeted and wrote: ‘Mike Pence did not have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our country and our Constitution by giving states the opportunity to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate information they previously had to confirm. The USA demands the truth!’”

The filing states: “The content of the 2:24 p.m. tweet was not a message sent to address a matter of public interest and alleviate unrest; It was the message of an angry candidate who realized he would lose power.”

A minute later, the Secret Service evacuated Pence to a safe location.

When Trump learned that Pence had been evacuated, he said, “So what?”

The filing states that Trump said, “So what?” after being told that Pence had subsequently been taken to a safe location.

The indictment says the government does not intend to use the exchange in court. However, it is argued that the tweet itself was “unofficial”.

The filing said Pence “tried to encourage Trump as a friend” when news networks predicted a Biden victory on Nov. 7. This in turn leads to the claim that Trump acted in a private capacity.

Pence allegedly told Trump: “You have breathed new life into a dying political party.”

“Fight like hell,” whatever

The filing says Trump was overheard telling his family members while trying to overturn the election results: “It doesn’t matter if you lose… you’ve got to fight like hell.”

“One day, long after the defendant began spreading false claims of fraud, (name redacted) a White House staffer traveling with the defendant overheard him telling family members, ‘It doesn’t matter if you won the election or have lost.’ You still have to fight like hell.’”

Trump knew his claims were false

The filing states: “The evidence shows that the defendant knew his fraud allegations were false because he continued to make these claims even after his close advisers – who were not acting in an official capacity but in a private or campaign capacity – told them that this was the case.” not true.”

Those advisers included a person known as P9, a White House staffer who was one of several lawyers who represented Trump in his first Senate impeachment trial in 2019 and 2020, the filing said.

In a private conversation, “when P9 reiterated to the defendant that (name redacted) could not prove his false fraud allegations in court, the defendant responded: ‘The details don’t matter’.”

P9 once told Trump after the election “that the campaign looked into his claims of fraud and even hired outside experts to do so, but could find no support for them.”
He told the defendant that if the campaign took these claims to court, they would be butchered because the claims were all “nonsense.”