Former President Donald Trump “resorted to crimes” and bullied Mike Pence in the plot to overturn his loss in the 2020 election, Special Counsel Jack Smith charged in a new filing unsealed Wednesday in the federal Jan. 6 election interference case.
In never-before-seen evidence, prosecutors detailed Trump’s effort to cajole Pence into joining the illegal scheme to stay in power and his effort to incite his followers to attack the Capitol and block the certifications of President Biden’s election when Pence refused.
“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office,” the prosecution wrote in the filing.
The 165-page document amounts to Smith’s argument that Trump’s alleged misdeeds are not covered by the substantial presidential immunity granted by the Supreme Court. It was ordered unsealed Wednesday by District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan.
Prosecutors said Trump acted in his private capacity as a presidential candidate, not in his official capacity as president, for which the top court said he could not be held criminally accountable.
“[Trump’s] scheme was fundamentally a private one,” Smith’s team said. “He pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted — a function in which the defendant, as president, had no official role.”
Some of the most evocative new evidence bared in the filing concerns Trump’s effort to browbeat Pence.
At a private lunch the two had on Nov. 12, 2020, Pence “reiterated a face-saving option” for Trump, telling him, “don’t concede but recognize the process is over,” according to prosecutors.
In another private lunch days later, Pence urged Trump to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024.
“I don’t know, 2024 is so far off,” Trump told him, according to the filing.
As the Jan. 6, 2021 certification date drew near, Trump ramped up efforts to bully Pence into bowing to his scheme to accept fake pro-Trump slates of electoral votes from some battleground states, a plot designed to throw Biden’s election into doubt.
On Jan. 6, Trump threatened to call out Pence to his violent extremist supporters if he did not cave.
“I’m going to have to say you did a great disservice,” Trump told Pence, according to the filing.
After delivering a fiery speech to supporters, Trump returned to the White House where he watched the violence at the Capitol unfold on TV.
He alone wrote and sent a tweet deriding Pence as supporters hunted down his vice president, chanting “Hang Mike Pence,” the filing charges.
The filing quotes Trump as telling an aide “So what?” when he was told Pence could be in danger after violent supporters stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
A Trump spokesman derided the filing as part of a liberal witch hunt to tarnish Trump and prevent him from beating Democrat Kamala Harris and winning a return to the White House.
The filing almost surely marks the last chance for the public to assess and discover previously unknown actions carried out by Trump before he faces the verdict of voters in the 2024 election.
Trump was hit with a new streamlined superseding indictment in the case after the Supreme Court ruling last summer.
But any potential trial is many months away. Chutkan still needs to rule if the new charges meet the criteria laid down for determining presidential immunity. Her ruling would then likely be appealed back to the Supreme Court.
The new documents also includes voluminous details of Trump’s involvement in the state-by-state effort to convince Republican officials to create the bogus slates of alternate electors.
It details the efforts of lieutenants believed to be Rudy Giuliani and ex-Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, although their names are blacked out in the filing.
Trump already faces sentencing after Election Day for his criminal conviction in the Manhattan hush money case in which he was convicted.