Donald Trump's legal team "appears bent on helping prosecutors" in their election interference case against him based on a report cited in the former president's latest legal brief, according to a Washington Post analysis. Prosecutors have said the former president's false voter fraud claims fabricated grounds for him to illegally overturn the 2020 election, with special counsel Jack Smith writing in his indictment of Trump that the fake electors plot was intended to "create a fake controversy" that could be used to fuel the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
Deep within the Tuesday filing in Trump's appeal for presidential immunity in the criminal case, senior political reporter Aaron Blake notes that the former president's attorneys cite a social media post from Trump that links to a report from an unnamed source pushing similar claims. The report, which Blake writes "is a mess," puts forth a number of false voter fraud allegations, its first paragraph concluding "there is no evidence Joe Biden won." It also cites multiple accounts of alleged election fraud that don't appear to be publicly available, in one instance citing seven chapters from a so-called "Report on Widespread Fraud in the Georgia 2020 Presidential Election" but failing to provide an author or link. A Google search, Blake added, does not return any report with that title.
Trump's attorneys don't state that the report's claims are true in the brief, but, they argue, it shows there are still “vigorous disputes" and "questions" surrounding the "actual" 2020 election results. "The aim is to apparently cite the smoke without actually claiming there’s fire," Blake concludes. "But what it demonstrates is how much this entire effort was about manufacturing smoke. And in that way, the Trump lawyers in effect just proved the prosecutors’ point."
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