According to a recap tweeted by journalist Robert Costa, who writes for The Washington Post, the investigative team at the federal Justice Department led by Special Counsel Jack Smith that’s examining plots after the last presidential election to leave Trump in power despite his loss is focusing on the possibility of “criminal intent” amid key steps.
That potentially provable intent could implicate Trump himself and in this context is under investigation as it relates to the idea of federally seizing election machines after the 2020 race.
As has been discussed by then-White House counsel Pat Cipollone, there was no established legal basis for federally taking that step. It came up, though, during a meeting in the middle of December 2020 at the White House with participants including Sidney Powell and Michael Flynn. As explained by Costa, a key idea in the Smith investigation is examining whether there was knowledge on key players’ part of how they were going against the established legal record in their harebrained ambitions. And that could be linked to a specific intent to use those ostensibly legal maneuvers to force a different outcome in the then-recent presidential race!
“Hearing from 2 sources, familiar with the special counsel grand jury on J6, that Trump’s consideration of using purported fed. authority to seize voting machines is under scrutiny,” Costa wrote online. “SC probing whether there was criminal intent to build a premise for delay/block in certification… Many Qs for witnesses, I’m told, related to whether people knowingly used fraud to try to achieve their ends. Did they know the alt. elec scheme was based on lies/bad intel? (Rudy had so many [affidavits] coming in.) And did they push machine scheme knowing they weren’t at fault?”
Though some of the more extreme steps under consideration in Trump’s circles were neither fully pursued nor, well, successful, Donald himself has always been an avid supporter of some of the most blatantly false conspiracy theories.
Read Costa’s thread right here.
