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A federal judge has released additional evidence against Donald Trump in his election interference case.
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The release follows a previously unsealed motion with new evidence against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.
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Trump tried to delay the release of Friday’s court documents until after the 2024 presidential election.
A federal judge on Friday released more than 1,800 pages of documents related to the election interference case against Donald Trump, but there was little new information in the collection of records and transcripts.
United States District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan approved the release of the documents over the objections of Trump’s lawyers. The collection is related to special counsel Jack Smith’s 165-page bombshell motion that included a trove of new evidence against Trump in the case.
The documents released Friday are an appendix to the previously unsealed motion in which Smith and his team argued that Trump is not immune from criminal charges tied to his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election. The lengthy appendix includes heavily-redacted records that have been previously made publicly available.
Parts of Trump’s infamous phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger are redacted. Hundreds of pages were withheld entirely, leaving only “SEALED” in all-caps and other perfunctory information visible.
Trump’s attorneys filed a motion Thursday to attempt to delay the release of the appendix until November 14 — nine days after the 2024 presidential election, but Chutkan rejected the arguments.
Trump has pleaded not guilty to the four federal charges against him in the case.
Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told Business Insider in a statement that the case, which he called an “Unconstitutional Witch Hunt,” should be dismissed.
“Radical Democrats are hell-bent on interfering in the presidential election on behalf of Lyin’ Kamala Harris,” Cheung’s statement said. “With just over two weeks until Election Day, President Trump is dominating this race, and Crazed Liberals throughout the Deep State are freaking out.”
Here are the takeaways from the documents released Friday.
“War Gaming the Alternatives”
The evidence released Friday included a more detailed draft of John Eastman’s previously publicized January 6 memo, in which the then-Trump attorney laid out his game plan for overturning the 2020 election.
“War gaming the Alternatives,” Eastman calls it at one point.
The six-page memo lists purported “Illegal conduct by election officials” in the swing states of Georgia, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Arizona, and Nevada.
The conduct justifies Pence rejecting the pro-Biden electors from those states, Eastman wrote.
A two-page draft of the same memo, which did not include the state-by-state breakdowns, was previously made public by CNN in 2021.
Highlights from Mike Pence’s book
Prosecutors’ newly-unsealed evidence against Trump includes at least 18 photocopied pages from Mike Pence’s memoir “So Help Me God,” in which the former vice president describes Trump trying to pressure him into blocking the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election win.
The pages from Pence’s book included in the appendix feature passages highlighted in yellow.
“I told him, as I had told him many times before, that I did not believe I possessed the power under the Constitution to decide votes to accept or reject. He just kept coming,” one highlighted portion read.
Pence’s book was first published in 2022.
Rusty Bowers says he hung up on Trump
The documents also include a heavily redacted transcript from a January 6 Committee interview of Rusty Bowers, in which the then-Arizona House Speaker described hanging up on Trump after turning down his request to ignore the state’s Biden electors and install electors for Trump instead.
“That’s exactly what I did,” Bowers told committee member Adam Schiff during the June 19, 2022 interview. “I disconnected us. I hung up on him.”
News of the phone call was first made public during the committee’s televised hearings, shortly after the interview, though Bower’s abruptly ending the call was not detailed at the time.
Trump’s January 6 speech
Smith’s team also included an FBI transcript of Trump’s now-infamous January 6 speech. The then-president’s words were at the center of his post-Capitol riot impeachment.
Trump and his supporters have long clung to his statement that protesters would be “marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.”
Trump spent most of the address pressuring Pence and “weak” Republicans — many of whom he called out by name — not to certify the results in front of them.
The House January 6 committee uncovered evidence that Trump promised to join protestors during his speech. However, the promise was ad-libbed and never included in the prepared written speech. The then-president never joined the protest.
Rioters delayed the certification of Biden’s win, which wasn’t finished until early on January 7.
Trump’s attorneys and campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.
Trump tweets
Smith’s team included hundreds of tweets Trump published on his personal account or retweeted on the platform then known as Twitter.
The messages began shortly after Election Day 2020 and continued through the January 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
Among the tweets included are Trump’s now-famous December 2020 invitation for supporters to come to DC for a protest on January 6, promising it “will be wild!”
In another included January 6 tweet, Trump said, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage,” after the vice president made clear he would certify Biden’s victory.
Pence has since said that he feared for his life during the riot and that Trump never checked on his well-being.
Trump was permanently barred from Twitter two days after the riot. Elon Musk lifted the ban in November 2022, not long after he bought Twitter, now rebranded as X.
This wasn’t the first special counsel’s investigation to analyze Trump’s tweets. Special counsel Robert Mueller repeatedly cited Trump’s tweets in his report on Russian meddling in the 2016 election and whether the then-president obstructed the probe.
Smith’s team and Twitter fought a lengthy legal battle over a search warrant related to information about Trump’s account, a fight that was initially sealed from public view.
Earlier this month, the Supreme Court declined to hear X’s challenge.
October 18, 2024: This story was updated to include more information from the released evidence.
Read the original article on Business Insider
