Oct. 2 (UPI) — New details from special counsel Jack Smith’s election interference case against Donald Trump were unsealed Wednesday, revealing prosecutors’ claims that the former president “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”
U.S. District Judge for the District of Columbia Tanya Chatman unsealed the 165-page filing, which lays out Smith’s case that Trump was acting as a private citizen when he disputed the 2020 election results. The former president is currently seeking a second term in a tight race with Vice President Kamala Harris. Trump has pleaded not guilty to all charges.
“At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors allege in the motion, unsealed Wednesday. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”
Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled that a president is immune from prosecution for official acts. Smith responded by filing another indictment in August, narrowing the allegations against Trump and claiming the former president was acting as a private candidate when he questioned his 2020 election loss.
On Wednesday, Trump’s lawyers opposed the filing, which they described as “tantamount to a premature and improper special counsel report,” arguing that the public release of Smith’s case violates Department of Justice policies and could influence the election.
Trump also blasted the timing of the document’s unsealing, calling it “election interference” following Tuesday night’s debate and with less than five weeks before the election.
“Democrats are weaponizing the Justice Department against me because they know I am winning, and they are desperate to prop up their failing candidate, Kamala Harris,” Trump wrote Wednesday in a post on Truth Social.
“The DOJ pushed out this latest ‘hit job’ today because JD Vance humiliated Tim Walz last night in the debate,” Trump added. “The Democrat party is turning America into a Third World country that tries to censor, harass and intimidate their political opponents.”
In Wednesday’s filing, prosecutors identified witnesses they would call at a trial to testify against Trump, including election officials in battleground states and his White House deputy chief of staff.
“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin,” Smith wrote.
“His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Mike Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on Jan. 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the U.S. Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification,” prosecutors alleged in the filing.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung called the filing “falsehood-ridden” and “unconstitutional.”
“Deranged Jack Smith and Washington D.C., radical Democrats are hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department in an attempt to cling to power,” Cheung claimed Wednesday.
“President Trump is dominating, and the radical Democrats throughout the deep state are freaking out. This entire case is a partisan, unconstitutional witch hunt that should be dismissed entirely.”
