Scenes From a Brief

One of the more dramatic court filings

Trump campaign adviser Jason Miller, enthroned, with the Hand Sanitizer of State. Actually, that's an illusion, he was walking into the US Capitol when this was taken, during Trump's second impeachment in January 2021. Photo by Andrew Harnik/AFP via Getty Images, as seen at CBS News.

Miller, P4 in the Jack Smith cast of witnesses (I'm reading Smith’s wonderfully vivid brief on the January 6 case and the theory that the president is immune from prosecution if he stages a coup in the course of performing his official duties), was among those who advised the president that the 2020 election had not in fact been stolen by Democrats, that there were not more than 10,000 votes from dead people in Georgia's returns but more like 12 total, which "could not be outcome-determinative" as Smith dryly points out, and that the video of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss during the tabulation of ballots at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta did not show them pulling ballots from suitcases under the tables and counting them multiple times or "quite obviously surreptitiously passing around  USB ports [presumably containing fraudulent vote counts] as if they are vials of heroine or cocaine" as Giuliani put it in testimony before the Government Affairs Committee of the Georgia House of Representatives. 

Miller even got a little tetchy about it (p. 25):

(P26 is apparently the Georgia attorney general Christopher Carr, whom Trump had called on December 8, asking him not to discourage the other state AGs from joining in the lawsuit pressed by Texas's Ken Paxton against Pennsylvania and other states including Georgia, to stop them from certifying their elections.)

Later, summonsed by the House Committee on the January 6 Attack, Miller tried to suggest that Trump really believed in his constant allegations of election fraud by the Democrats in spite of having been told by all his White House advisors that they weren't true, and losing all his lawsuits on the subject in every state and federal court that heard them, and was therefore in a sense innocent of fraud on his own part, but that's not exactly what he said, limiting it to one advisor, Matt Oczkowski, who had told Trump he was losing on election night:

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“He believed that Matt was not looking at the prospect of legal challenges going our way and that Matt was looking at purely from what those numbers were showing as opposed to broader things to include legality and election integrity,” Miller wrote, “issues which, as a data guy, he may not have been monitoring.”

What it really shows is that Trump was pretty much expecting to lose the vote, and that he and Giuliani were already planning the next phase of the battle, with the Elite Strike Force Legal Team, before they'd seen any evidence of fraud; they'd be suing (as they did) whether there was evidence or not.

And that's how Trump's private lawyers proceeded, in fact, in their communications with the state officials they were trying to persuade, promising evidence and never delivering it, because it never did exist, or was as weak and plainly bogus as that Freeman-Moss video. 

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And here's a charming bit on the fake elector scheme from p. 54; an anxious exchange between dogsbody Mike Roman (P5, charged with conspiracy in Arizona, racketeering in Georgia, and forgery in Wisconsin) and Jeffrey Clark (CC6, disbarred for two years in D.C.), the man who may have been the attorney general for some hours on January 3:

Lawrence Tabas (P46, weirdly misidentified in a Gemini Pro hallucination as "Bernie Keirk [sic]"), the chair of the Pennsylvania Republican party, who Trump ("the defendant") had called on November 6 for an explanation of why he had lost in Pennsylvania in spite of looking like he had won there on the evening of November 5 (it was because the mail-in ballots were overwhelmingly for Biden, of course) is messing up plans by telling the "electors" that they could go to jail for what they're doing, and the "electors" are getting "wound up". 

Roman asks Clark either to come up with a counterargument or make Tabas stop; Clark opts for the latter (tacitly admitting that there is no counterargument), and Roman advises him to go to the top of the organization for that: Consigliere Rudolph Giuliani (CC1). 

The next day, Giuliani addresses a conference call of the Pennsylvania "electors", promising them (falsely, that is not the plan) that their names wouldn't be come into play unless Trump won the Supreme Court appeal of many of the 14 lawsuits he'd filed to invalidate the Pennsylvania vote (which the Court dismissed without comment on February 22). The guys seem to have been somewhat balky. "Whoever selected this slate should be shot," Roman texted to Jenna Ellis. "These people are making this so much more complicated than it needs to be omg," Ellis replied, "We couldn't have found 20 people better than this?"

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One more vignette, for now, from Trump's January 6 speech at the Ellipse, where I think Smith's team clarifies what Trump thought he was doing with the speech:

While he knew that Pence was not going to change his mind, he encouraged the crowd to think that might happen, in the interpolations he added, in his usual style, to Stephen Miller's prepared text (as I've said before, the "peacefully and patriotically" line was Miller, the master of alliteration, while Trump's own words were all about "fight"), urged them to the place where the joint session of Congress was about to certify the election, which all his efforts over the previous weeks had failed to stop them from doing, and promised to march with them, like Napoleon storming at the head of a party of grenadiers into the joint session of the legislature on 18th Brumaire 1799—Smith's brief doesn't mention Cassidy Hutchinson's story of Trump fighting with his driver to bring him to the Capitol instead of back to the White House, but I'm sure it's true. 

There's no doubt the mob took it that way as they broke into the building at around 2:13, shouting at the Capitol Police officer leading them up the stairs, "Where the fuck they at? Where the fuck they counting the votes at?" And when Trump, who'd been observing their progress on his TV, issued the tweet denouncing Pence at 2:24, they took it as an order. 

Anybody who tries to claim this wasn't an attempted coup is a fool or a liar.