The special counsel team prosecuting former President Donald Trump for interference in the 2020 presidential election is signaling it wants to use Trump's false claims about election fraud dating back a decade to demonstrate "his motive, intent, and plan" to cling to power.
In a new court filing, prosecutors said Trump had a record of refusing to honor the peaceful transition of power — and a pattern of sidelining people who pushed back on his bogus assertions of fraud, including the former chief counsel to the Republican National Committee and a Georgia election worker, sometimes encouraging violence against them.
Senior Assistant Special Counsel Molly Gaston wrote the Justice Department planned to introduce evidence at next year's trial about an unnamed and unindicted co-conspirator who worked on Trump's 2020 campaign.
This person allegedly sent text messages to a Trump lawyer where he "encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction" after the vote count at Detroit's TCF Center leaned in Joe Biden's direction on Nov. 4, 2020.
Around that same time, an election official at that Detroit site saw people flooding to the area and making "illegitimate and aggressive challenges" to the voting tallies, the DOJ filing said. For his part, Trump posted false claims about election activities there, "when in truth his agent was seeking to cause a riot to disrupt the count," prosecutor Gaston wrote.
"This evidence is admissible to demonstrate that the defendant, his...
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