As Donald Trump sought to retain the presidency after losing the 2020 election, members of his legal team wondered whether they could take the dramatic step of rigging the results in his favor and simply throw out hundreds of thousands of votes legally cast in Philadelphia.
According to special counsel Jack Smith, the conspiracy was part of a multilateral effort to keep Trump in power, published report early Tuesday.
And while the plan never came to fruition, according to the report he cites, it was discussed by some of the highest officials in his orbit Rudy Giuliani – then Trump’s personal lawyer – saying the idea was to “simply change the vote completely, subtract that number of votes from… deeming those votes, 300,000 votes in Philadelphia, illegal, unlawful. Reduce that number by 300,000.”
The plan’s inclusion in Smith’s report was once again a reminder of the pivotal role Pennsylvania played in the 2020 election, and also showed how the state became the center of attention for Trump and his lawyers as they sought to challenge Joe Biden’s victory on crucial 19 electoral votes. Biden, Democrat, he defeated Trump by 80,000 votes in Pennsylvania that same year, providing him with a key battleground in a close and consistent competition.
The release of Smith’s 137-page report marks the end of his attempt to convict Trump of trying to steal the 2020 election results. With Trump set to return to the White House next week after winning the 2024 election, Smith said it was not possible to pursue the case further because of the Justice Department’s long-standing policy against prosecuting sitting presidents.
“The Department’s view that the Constitution prohibits further impeachment and prosecution of the President is categorical and does not take into account the gravity of the crimes charged, the strength of the evidence presented by the Government, or the merits of the prosecution, all of which the Office fully stands behind,” Smith wrote. “Indeed, but for Mr. Trump’s election and imminent return to the presidency, the Office has assessed that the admissible evidence was sufficient to obtain and sustain a conviction at trial.”
Trump he replied on social media criticizing Smith, calling him “deranged” and claiming that his efforts to obtain a conviction were politically motivated.
“Jack is a lousy prosecutor who failed to get his case heard before the election, which I won in a landslide,” Trump wrote.
Smith has revealed in previous court documents the extent to which prosecutors say Trump’s various plots to stay in the White House four years ago intersected with the situation in Pennsylvania: Trump’s team sought to recruit “fake voters” to prevent Congress from certifying the vote; involved several prominent state Republican operatives in this effort; and was counting on the Kensington resident to play a key role in sowing distrust of the results.
More than 100 Pennsylvanians have also been charged with storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 — an attempt to block the certification of Biden’s victory and which Smith said Trump provoked by encouraging violence against his perceived opponents. Trump denied this and said the prosecution of those involved in the riots was corrupt and unfair. He promised to pardon at least some of the convicts.
As for the vote-throwing plot in Philadelphia, Smith said it showed how Trump and his entourage sought to “effectively discard legal votes in a way that would deprive citizens of the right to vote and have their votes counted.”
Giuliani, referred to as “Co-conspirator 1” in the report, discussed the idea of focusing on Philadelphia with Trump ally Steve Bannon on a podcast shortly after Election Day 2020. Smith, however, said Trump sought to pursue similar efforts elsewhere, including by pressuring at the official with the most votes in Georgia to “find” the votes that would swing the state in his favor, and insisting that then-Vice President Mike Pence “rejected legal election records that reflected millions of citizen votes in the targeted states.”
“The evidence showed that Mr. Trump precisely targeted this election law: He focused his false claims of voter fraud on select states, or cities and counties within those states, with large numbers of voters who chose not to re-elect him,” Smith wrote.
Much of Smith’s report concerned material that had already been publicly disclosed either in previous court filings filed by his office or in documents made public by congressional investigators.
It included several other mentions of Pennsylvania, including references to the “sham voter” program that Trump’s team sought to implement in six other battleground states that he also lost, and a description of how Trump “repeatedly made false claims of fraud.” , which could be proven even though local officials, including then-chairman of the state Republican Party Lawrence Tabas, claimed otherwise.
The report also revisited Trump’s attacks on then-Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt, a Republican who publicly defended the integrity of the city’s vote count. After Trump posted a tweet criticizing Schmidt, “threats against [him] became more targeted, detailed and more graphic,” the report said, with some containing “very personal data such as names and ages [his] family members, as well as photos or the address of his home.”
Smith said the common link in all of Trump’s efforts is “deception” and added, “the evidence shows that Trump has weaponized these lies to defeat a function of the federal government that is fundamental to the democratic process in the United States.”
