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The Trump Coup


PIECING TOGETHER WHAT TRUMP KNEW AND WHEN HE KNEW IT

The Jan. 6th Committee report establishes a clear record of his intentional
lies.
by William Saletan
December 20, 2022 2:46 am
(Composite /Photos: GettyImages / Shutterstock)
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When Donald Trump claimed that he had won the 2020 election—and when he exhorted
his followers, on that basis, to march to the Capitol on January 6, 2021—did he
know that his claim wasn’t true?

The answer to that question isn’t obvious. One could argue, based on Trump’s
public behavior, that he was pathologically deluded and sincerely thought he had
won. If some jurors buy that theory—if they decide that Trump was sincere,
albeit wildly wrong—it might be hard to convict him of the crimes for which the
House January 6th Committee has recommended his prosecution.

On Monday, in its final hearing, the committee referred Trump to the Department
of Justice for possible indictments based on four statutes. One of the statutes,
18 U.S.C. § 1512, applies only if the accused person “corruptly” sought to
impede an official proceeding. Another, 18 U.S.C. § 371, applies only if he
conspired to “defraud” the government, using “deceit, craft or trickery.” A
third, 18 U.S.C. § 1001, applies only if he “knowingly and willfully” made false
or fraudulent statements.

In the hearing and in the “introductory material” the committee released in
anticipation of its full report later this week, the panel’s members concluded
that Trump knew enough to be charged with these crimes. Here’s their evidence.

1. Trump planned to claim fraud long before he had any plausible basis. “In the
weeks before election day 2020, Donald Trump’s campaign experts, including his
campaign manager Bill Stepien, advised him that the election results would not
be fully known on election night,” says the report. Despite this, the committee
found “a range of evidence”—to be fleshed out in the full report—“of Trump’s
preplanning for a false declaration of victory.”

2. Trump ignored his campaign manager’s warnings on election night. In
conversations with Trump as the returns came in, “Stepien and other campaign
experts advised him that the results of the election would not be known for some
time, and that he could not truthfully declare victory,” says the report. Trump
“refused” to accept these warnings, and he declared victory that night.

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3. After the election, every knowledgeable person in the government and in
Trump’s campaign told him that his claims were false. The report quotes Trump’s
then-attorney general, Bill Barr: “I repeatedly told the president in no
uncertain terms that I did not see evidence of fraud . . . that would have
affected the outcome of the election.” Barr said he had told Trump that his
allegations were “not panning out” and “not meritorious.”

Richard Donoghue, who was then Trump’s acting deputy attorney general, told the
committee that he and the acting attorney general who succeeded Barr, Jeff
Rosen, had tried “to put it in very clear terms to the president.” Donoghue said
he had explained to Trump that the Justice Department had examined allegations
in “Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada.” He said he had told Trump
“something to the effect of ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds
of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence
developed.’”

Pat Cipollone, Trump’s White House counsel, told the committee that in a meeting
with Trump and a circle of election-fraud conspiracy theorists (led by Sidney
Powell) on Dec. 18, 2020, he had told the group that “I had seen no evidence of
massive fraud in the election. . . . That was made clear to them, okay, over and
over again.”

Jason Miller, a senior adviser to Trump’s campaign, said he had told the
president “several” times that as to “election day fraud and irregularities,
there were not enough to overturn the election.” He also said he told Trump that
“the international allegations” against Dominion Voting Systems, the electronic
voting company that pro-Trump conspiracy theorists were targeting, “were not
valid.”

4. Trump repeated numerous false statements shortly after being told they were
false. The report details eighteen cases in which this happened, compiled in a
handy table. The most damning examples are from Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, phone call
with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, which was recorded. For
instance, Raffensperger told Trump that the story the president was spreading
about ballots being counted three times in one county was false. Raffensperger
explained that video evidence debunked Trump’s story, and he offered to send
Trump a link to the video.

Trump replied: “I don’t care about a link. I don’t need it.”

The next day, Trump completely misrepresented the phone call, tweeting: “I spoke
to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger yesterday . . . He was unwilling, or
unable, to answer questions such as the ‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot
destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.”

The “dead voters” allegation is another example. In the phone call, Trump
claimed that “dead people voted” in Georgia and that the “minimum is close to
about 5,000 voters.” Raffensperger then explained to Trump that he had checked
out this allegation and “the actual number [was] two. Two. Two people that were
dead that voted. So that’s wrong.”

Trump ignored the correction. In fact, in his speech just before the Jan. 6th
attack, he doubled the figure: “Over 10,300 ballots in Georgia were cast by
individuals whose names and dates of birth match Georgia residents who died in
2020 and prior to the election.”

The report also notes that Barr, in a Nov. 23 meeting with Trump, debunked the
president’s wild statements about Dominion. “I specifically raised the Dominion
voting machines,” Barr told the committee. “I saw absolutely zero basis for the
allegations. . . . I told him that it was crazy stuff and they were wasting
their time on that.”

Three days after that meeting, Trump repeated the same smears: “[T]hose machines
are fixed, they’re rigged. You can press Trump and the vote goes to Biden. . . .
All you have to do is play with a chip, and they played with a chip, especially
in Wayne County and Detroit.”

5. Trump acknowledged that his claims didn’t check out. Stepien told the
committee that he had investigated Trump’s allegations and had told the
president, in each case, that the claim “wasn’t true.” The committee’s
interviewer asked Stepien how Trump had reacted to these corrections. “Usually
he had pretty clear eyes. Like, he understood,” Stepien recalled. “We told him
where we thought the race was, and I think he was pretty realistic with our
viewpoint, in agreement with our viewpoint . . .”

6. Trump acknowledged that he had lost. Cassidy Hutchinson, who had served as a
special assistant to the president, told the committee that in mid-December
2020, when the Supreme Court dismissed a suit to block the election results,
Trump was furious. She said she had heard Trump tell Mark Meadows, who was then
his chief of staff, “something to the effect of, ‘I don’t want people to know we
lost . . . I don’t want people to know that we lost.”

The committee says these incidents prove that Trump knew his allegations were
false, and therefore he had the corrupt intent necessary to be charged with
violations of the statutes. The report also notes that David O. Carter, a
federal district judge, essentially agreed with this conclusion, in two separate
opinions handed down in March and October. In the latter, Carter noted that the
evidence presented in his court showed that Trump “knew that the specific
numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in
court and to the public.” Carter also assessed, in the earlier opinion, that
Trump “likely knew [his] electoral count plan had no factual justification.”
Therefore, Carter, concluded, Trump’s “mindset exceeds the threshold for acting
‘corruptly’ under § 1512(c).”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Personally, I’m sympathetic to the argument that Trump thought he had won. He’s
a deranged narcissist. He believes what he wants to believe. As a citizen, I
agree that for this reason, among others, he should never be anywhere near
political power. But as a juror, I’d have to be persuaded that he meets
standards such as “knowingly,” “willfully,” “deceit,” and “defraud.”

The committee’s preliminary report goes a considerable way toward persuading me.
A man who goes around repeating stories that he has been told are false, again
and again, is certainly being willful. And by concealing what he’s been told—or,
in the case of his interactions with Raffensperger, egregiously misrepresenting
what he’s been told—he knowingly deceives the public. I’m not sure how many
times a spreader of bogus allegations has to be corrected before his defiance of
corrections counts as deceit. But it’s less than eighteen.

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WILLIAM SALETAN

William Saletan is a writer at The Bulwark.
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