The team of Special Counsel Jack Smith is taking aim at former President Donald Trump’s false claims of election fraud, with the prosecution saying that even the ex-POTUS’ own officials described having no evidence of vote flipping in the 2020 presidential election.
“In short, and relevant to the indictment, there is no evidence to support the defendant’s false claims of voting machine fraud,” stated the motion filed on Saturday. “In support of his Motion to Compel, the defendant suggests that the Government relied only on a selection of politically biased officials (ECF No. 167 at 1-2), but he does not and cannot substantiate this theatrical claim. To the contrary, as the defendant is aware from the discovery that has been provided, the Government asked every pertinent witness—including the former DNI, former Acting Secretary of DHS, former Acting Deputy Secretary of DHS, former CISA Director, former Acting CISA Director, former CISA Senior Cyber Counsel, former National Security Advisor (“NSA”), former Deputy NSA, former Chief of Staff to the National Security Council, former Chairman of the Election Assistance Commission (‘EAC’), Presidential Intelligence Briefer, former Secretary of Defense, and former senior DOJ leadership—if they were aware of any evidence that a domestic or foreign actor flipped a single vote in a voting machine during the presidential election. The answer from every single official was no.”
Former President Donald Trump speaks during the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala at Cipriani Wall Street, Saturday, Dec. 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Yuki Iwamura)
The filing, signed by senior assistant special counsel Thomas Windom, said that the defense was also conflating voting machines — which are not connected to the internet — with voter registration records in Trump’s false claims to election fraud.
“In doing so, the defendant attempts to manufacture confusion by willfully ignoring the distinction between voting machines (charged in the indictment) and registration websites (not charged in the indictment),” documents stated.
The defense in Trump’s D.C. federal conspiracy case for allegedly attempting to subvert the 2020 election are seeking classified documents, and they claim that the government is refusing to turn over evidence that foreign nations played a role in all this.
“The Office cannot blame President Trump for public discord and distrust of the 2020 election results while refusing to turn over evidence that foreign actors stoked the very same flames that the Office identifies as inculpatory in the indictment,” they wrote. “The Office cannot rely on selected guidance and judgments by officials it favors from the Intelligence Community and law enforcement while ignoring evidence of political bias in those officials’ decision-making as well as cyberattacks and other interference, both actual and attempted, that targeted critical infrastructure and election facilities before, during, and after the 2020 election.”
Prosecutors said on Saturday that though foreign nations did steal certain records in order to target voters with disinformation, there’s no evidence those counties changed the results on any voting machine.
From their filing:
While no country or cyber actor changed a single vote in a machine, there were isolated cases of foreign countries stealing registration data to target voters with disinformation—actions that constituted foreign influence, not interference.
Ignoring this distinction, the defendant argues the DOJ-DHS Materiality Assessment is inconsistent and “heavily caveated” on foreign interference (ECF No. 167 at 13-14, 25-27), but omits what the report actually says. For instance, the defendant tells the Court that the agencies acknowledged “broad Russian and Iranian campaigns” that “did compromise the security of several networks that managed some election functions” (ECF No. 167 at 15), but misleadingly chops off the second half of the sentence, which made clear that the network compromises “did not materially affect the integrity of voter data, the ability to vote, the tabulation of votes, or the timely transmission of election results.”
The defense has maintained that there’s evidence of undercover agents and informants in the crowd of Trump supporters who stormed the U.S. Capitol building on Jan. 6. 2021. Smith’s team says that’s blaming the victim.
“And the defendant’s effort to blame law enforcement for the riot of which they were victims fares no better than the attempt of a bank robber to blame security guards who failed to stop his crime,” the government’s motion on Saturday stated. “Ultimately, law enforcement’s inability to prevent the Capitol siege has no bearing on the allegations, pled in the indictment, that the defendant fueled his supporters with knowingly false election-fraud claims, directed an angry crowd to the Capitol, did not try to stop or quell the crowd when it violently breached the Capitol building and halted the Congressional certification proceeding, and sought to leverage the resulting delay in proceedings.”
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