Justice Department prosecutors will introduce evidence at former President Donald Trump’s upcoming trial over the 2020 election alleging his campaign “encouraged rioting” to stop the vote count in Michigan, prosecutors said in a filing Tuesday, as the DOJ outlined some of the evidence it plans to use to prove Trump illegally tried to overturn his election loss.
Special Counsel Jack Smith, who’s leading the DOJ’s investigation, submitted a court filing Tuesday noting evidence prosecutors plan to use at the March 2024 trial that will help to “establish [Trump’s motive, intent, preparation, knowledge, absence of mistake, and common plan.”
While the indictment already alleges Trump and his allies unlawfully pressured state officials to change the election results, prosecutors also plan to introduce text messages between a Trump campaign staffer and a campaign attorney who was at a vote counting site in Detroit, in which the campaign employee allegedly “encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of [President Joe Biden]
.”
Prosecutors will also show evidence that “around the time” of those text messages, “as Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the [vote counting center] and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.”
While Trump then used those challenges to the vote count to make “repeated false claims regarding election...
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