On the personal notes, mom's doing okay in the hospital but she's stressed out because dad's in hospice care and she feels she needs to be at home taking care of him. Mom, you're the one with the cracked skull and broken wrist...
While donald trump won't face the criminal trial before the November general election, the court case focused on his role in the January 6th Insurrection is still proceeding; and got to the point where the special prosecutor Jack Smith presented evidence that's going to be used in that trial. To say that's it damning is an understatement (via Carrie Johnson and Ryan Lucas at NPR):
In a newly unsealed court filing, special counsel Jack Smith provides the most detailed picture yet of his criminal case against Donald Trump for allegedly trying to overturn the 2020 election and why the former president isn't immune from prosecution.
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, released the filing, with minor redactions, on Wednesday.
A link to the court documents is here. The redactions for what they're worth are mostly hiding names of trump and his alleged co-conspirators/handlers... which hasn't stopped people from matching them based on the evidence that's already out there.
The special counsel uses the 165-page document to make his case that Trump's actions around the election were made in a private capacity and not in his official role as president.
The filing comes after the Supreme Court ruled this summer that presidents enjoy broad immunity for official acts while in office, but not for unofficial acts as a candidate or a private citizen.
"When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office," the special counsel's team writes. "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..."
The broad strokes of the special counsel's allegations against Trump have long been known. The filing, though, adds some new details, including sensitive testimony from witnesses and notes taken by former Vice President Mike Pence...
Getting into those details highlighted the lengths to which trump and his cohorts attempted to sabotage, hinder, or destroy the 2020 general election results. The Politico website counted multiple seriously deranged and illegal acts (via Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein):
According to prosecutors, at one point during Trump’s bid to overturn the results, a Trump White House aide overheard Trump tell his daughter Ivanka and son-in-law Jared Kushner: “It doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” The comment was allegedly made on Marine One.
Prosecutors said they would prove at trial that Trump and his allies often made up statistics about voter fraud “from whole cloth.” For example, Trump and allies alleged that 36,000 noncitizens had cast ballots in Arizona, changing the figure to “a few hundred thousand” five days later, eventually revising it back to “bare minimum … 40 or 50,000,” then to 32,000 and back up to the original number of 36,000.
One week after Election Day in 2020, Trump told then-Gov. Doug Ducey (R-Ariz.) that he was “packaging up” fraud evidence to share with him, prosecutors wrote. But Trump never provided it. Ducey told Trump that Arizona was all but lost, comparing it to being in “the ninth inning, two outs, and [the defendant] was several runs down,” Smith’s brief recounted...
Never mind that there's already laws to ensure non-citizens can't vote, trump was still using his fearmongering over immigrants to justify overturning legit election results. He and his team kept fibbing the numbers to whatever they needed in that moment to claim whatever victory trump could. And when it came time to present evidence, they never did. Because it was never real. Goddamn him.
Prosecutors, who had more access to telephone records and emails than the congressional committee that investigated Jan. 6, allege that Trump spoke to ally Steve Bannon by phone on Jan. 5 less than two hours before Bannon issued a prescient and provocative prediction on his War Room podcast that “all hell is going to break loose” on Jan. 6...
Well before Jan. 6, an unidentified Trump campaign employee enthusiastically spoke of the potential for a riot in Michigan. The employee, whom prosecutors described as a co-conspirator, allegedly sought to “create chaos” at a polling center in Detroit when it became clear a batch of election returns favorable to Biden was legitimate. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the alleged co-conspirator said to a colleague, prosecutors wrote. When the colleague said an outbreak of violence appeared imminent, the campaign employee replied: “Make them riot” and “Do it!!!”
These are the tidbits that prove trump and his people wanted a riot, all the riots across battleground states as well as the Capitol, in order to disrupt and destroy the results, so he could steal the election and stay in power. trump's "rally" on January 6th was never going to be peaceful: It was a call to violence.
It's terrifying that trump is not going to sit in a courtroom and answer for his misdeeds before the November 5th election day. It's insane that the Republican Party refused to stop trump from forcing himself back atop their ballot, because now we're facing the possibility trump can steal (he can't win the popular vote, at best he can skew the Electoral College or at worst throw the results into chaos) the presidential election.
If trump gets back into the Oval Office he will squash this and every other criminal investigation into his actions. trump will deny New York the 34-count felony conviction and destroy the entire concept of "justice for all" for the nation for all time. We will have a confirmed felon and sex offender as President and he will inflict his criminal passions upon the nation and the world.
This isn't up to the courts anymore: Chief Justice Roberts made certain of that.
This is up to us voters, all of us from Democrats to Independents to even Republicans who respect the rule of law and despise trump and what he stands for.
For all the efforts to suppress voters - for all the lies about who's voting - the Republicans can't win if everyone shows up to vote and NOT vote for them. If the numbers are overwhelming in favor of Democrats - in favor of the pro-choice referendums on many state ballots - the Far Right wingnuts trying to sabotage the results won't have any legal leg to stand on. They would - and should - fail in many of the courtrooms even to the point where trump's own compliant Supreme Court can't save him.
Get the vote out, America. Every single one of us who sees trump for what he is - a failed, corrupt criminal - and who sees Republicans for what they are - broken, fear-driven rage merchants living in their own conspiracy bubbles desperate to rule or ruin - need to show up this election cycle. Be it by mail-in ballot, be it by early voting, be it by standing in line this Tuesday November 5th: We need to show up and vote. Our vote matters. Our vote is our power.
We need to stop trump from committing more crimes, and our vote for Harris/Walz and the Democrats across every seat on the ballots will do that.
Good luck.
