How the authoritarian sitting president criminally tried to overturn the 2020 election. Prosecutor Jack Smith lays out the evidence. From the AP:
1. “Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team wrote, adding, “When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”....
2. Trump “laid the groundwork” for rejecting the election results before the contest was over, telling advisers that in the event he held an early lead he would “declare victory before the ballots were counted and any winner was projected.”....
3. Immediately after the even ection, prosecutors say, his advisers sought to sow chaos in the counting of votes....
4. Prosecutors also argue Trump used his Twitter account to further his illegal scheme by spreading false claims of election fraud, attacking “those speaking the truth” about his election loss and exhorting his supporters to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, certification.
5. They intend to use “forensic evidence” from Trump’s iPhone to provide insight into Trump’s actions after the mob of his supporters began to attack the Capitol....
6. That “steady stream of disinformation” in the weeks after the election culminated in his speech at the Ellipse on the morning of Jan. 6, 2021, in which Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding,” prosecutors wrote. His “personal desperation was at its zenith” that morning as he was “only hours from the certification proceeding that spelled the end,” prosecutors wrote."
There will be a lot more evidence to come, of corse. I hope they include evidence that armed extremists were in nearby hotels ready for a second assault wave. Some of those are in prison now, I believe.
By the way, he is doing exactly the same thing again now in 2024. Another attempted coup after he loses another election. It’s being planned and organized. Too much of the country has given up on democracy
Prison please.
