In a startling, new filing from federal prosecutors, which is partially redacted in the form currently available to the public, it’s revealed that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s team evidently possesses evidence that an employee of the Trump campaign was allegedly encouraging rioting — though this encouraged violence appears to have been in Michigan rather than the much more infamous D.C. attack.
The involved incident affected the tabulation of votes after the 2020 presidential election in Detroit, Michigan. The immediate area leans heavily Democratic, and the state as a whole was eventually won by now President Joe Biden in the 2020 race. Michigan also became a central focus of debunked conspiracy theories of widespread election fraud — and in the Detroit incident, the mobbing at a center for vote counting became so intense that those running the place were left putting cardboard in the windows to protect personal information inside. It exemplifies the situation’s precarity.
“On November 4, 2020, the Campaign Employee exchanged a series of text messages with an attorney supporting the Campaign’s election day operations at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were being counted; in the messages, the Campaign Employee encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of the defendant’s opponent,” the new federal filing said.
Authorities characterized this individual as an unindicted co-conspirator to — and agent of — Trump, seeming to ultimately trace responsibility to the former president for the actions of this individual. Ultimately, the federal team points to the role of these details in showing Trump circles’ “intent and motive to obstruct and overturn the legitimate results” from 2020’s race.
The overall filing constituted a wide-reaching notice from the government of some of the evidence they’ve assembled that relates to the criminal case against Trump. Potentially proving a pattern on the former president’s part, Smith’s team even said they intended to bring forth evidence of Trump’s false claims of election fraud from years before the 2020 election even happened, stretching back to 2012 when Republican Mitt Romney and Democrat Barack Obama were on the ballot in the general election. Read more here.
