The latest indictment against former President Donald Trump focuses less on what happened the day of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot and more on a series of battleground states where his co-conspirators allegedly "pushed officials to ignore the popular vote."
Prosecutors for the Justice Department alleged on Tuesday that Trump and six co-conspirators "organized fraudulent slates of electors" in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin to sign certificates claiming that Joe Biden had not won in those states, according to the 45-page indictment.
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Although the certificates were ignored by lawmakers, prosecutors from special counsel Jack Smith's team said it was part of a "corrupt plan to subvert the federal government function by stopping Biden electors’ votes from being counted and certified.”
"After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the vice president would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd — including many individuals whom the defendant had deceived into believing the vice president could and might change the election results — violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding," the indictment says.
The fake electors plan started in Wisconsin, according to the indictment, which includes a memorandum from who is believed to be Kenneth Chesebro, an attorney who is not named but whose identity matches the description of "Co-Conspirator 5" in the indictment.
Chesebro penned the memo in mid-November 2020 that pushed for Trump supporters in Wisconsin to convene and cast their votes for him in the event that the Trump campaign's lawsuit in the state succeeded. Less than 30 days later, the attorney issued a new memo that called for expanding the strategy into other states.
Prosecutors alleged the scheme intended to "prevent Biden from receiving the 270 electoral votes necessary to secure the presidency on January 6.”
Once the plan was revised to include six additional states, Trump and attorney John Eastman, who is believed to be the second co-conspirator, asked Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel to help the Trump campaign recruit electors in the named states.
Smith's team claimed Trump and Eastman "falsely represented" to the RNC chairwoman that electors would only be used if Trump's lawsuits against the election outcome succeeded.
Rudy Giuliani, another attorney believed to be the first co-conspirator, allegedly "falsely assured" fake electors in Pennsylvania after they told him they had reservations about signing a certificate that would present them as legitimate electors.
But prosecutors said that court victories were not part of the plan come Dec. 13, when Chesebro wrote in an email that the strategy "was not to use the fraudulent electors only in the circumstance that the Defendant’s litigation was successful in one of the targeted states.” Rather, he wrote, "The plan was to falsely present the fraudulent slates as an alternative to the legitimate slates at Congress’s certification proceeding.”
New Mexico came into the equation the night before the Dec. 14 gathering of electors in the respective battleground states. The Trump campaign filed a suit in the state just minutes before the deadline for the electors' votes, and prosecutors said that was a "pretext so that there was pending litigation there at the time the fraudulent electors voted."
The fake Republican electors for Trump gathered at the same time as Democratic electors in the states met at their seat of state government. The fake electors signed and submitted their unofficial Electoral College certificates declaring Trump as the winner in the six battleground states, and the certificates were mailed to Congress and the National Archives and Records Administration.
Prosecutors alleged Trump attempted to spur a "fake controversy" surrounding the submissions in the days before Jan. 6, which coincided with his growing pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence to urge using the unsanctioned certificates to justify delaying certification of the election during the joint session of Congress.
While the indictment features few details about the damage and destruction caused by rioters on Jan. 6, it also doesn't introduce any new evidence tying Trump to the breach of the U.S. Capitol that day.
Prosecutors underscored that Trump "had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won.”
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Smith's Tuesday press conference summarized the alleged scheme but devoted part of his statement to the hardship that law enforcement endured because of the "lies by the defendant," calling the "men and women of law enforcement" who were there during the Jan. 6 riot "heroes" who did their duty to defend the Capitol.
"They're patriots, and they are the very best of us," Smith said of the Capitol Police. "They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States."