In a recent filing with federal Judge Tanya Chutkan, federal prosecutors handling the case against Donald Trump alleging a series of conspiracies targeting the 2020 presidential election rip the idea put forth in his legal filings that he was duped by foreign disinformation as he perpetrated his post-2020 election lies about what had occurred.
Trump’s team also sought to tie the violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to claimed foreign influence. The context in which they made these arguments was a push for a significant expansion of obligations on the government in the discovery process, meaning the routine, pretrial period in which case-related materials are shared. In this area, Trump’s team wants all information held by the government relating to alleged foreign efforts at influencing the 2020 elections, around which authorities said he’d failed to make the arguments necessary for establishing that broad category of documents as substantively tied to the case and forcing their release.
“The defendant’s second proffered reason for introducing foreign influence evidence is that, according to his discovery motion, the defendant—then the President of the United States with the full intelligence community apparatus at his disposal—was fooled by rumors that foreign adversaries spread following the 2020 election,” prosecutors mockingly summarized. Trump’s team doesn’t take this argument as far as fully rejecting the lies he has told about the 2020 race, instead only admitting the evident occurrence that “certain reports” about the election were determined inaccurate. That leaves open the rhetorical option for the former president to keep claiming imaginary fraud and just keep coming up with new explanations for the non-existent circumstances.
Trump “does not point to a single one of his false statements that he might have derived from a foreign nation, which renders the material irrelevant under this district’s caselaw,” the new federal filing added. Prosecutors also rebuffed the contention that foreign influence meaningfully spurred the Capitol violence of January 6, 2021, instead arguing again that Trump was responsible for inspiring what happened.
