Trump accuses Harris of election interference over release of court document

Donald Trump has accused Kamala Harris of trying to subvert the presidential election, after damning court documents were released just a month before polling day.
The former president has been charged with trying to overturn the result of the 2020 election, and the newly unsealed 165-page filing is the prosecution’s case against him. 
Among the claims made in the document are that Trump planned to “declare himself a winner” in the 2020 election before ballots were counted, and that he responded “so what” when he was told that Mike Pence, his vice president, was rushed to safety as the Capitol was stormed by rioters.
The timing of the release prompted a furious response from Trump on Wednesday night. 
He said: “The release of this falsehood-ridden, unconstitutional, Jan 6 brief immediately following Tim Walz’s disastrous Debate performance, and 33 days before the most important election in the history of our country, is another obvious attempt by the Harris-Biden regime to undermine and weaponise American democracy, and interfere in the 2024 presidential election”Mr Walz, Ms Harris’s running mate took on his Republican counterpart, JD Vance in a CBS vice-presidential debate on Tuesday night. Mr Vance was widely deemed the winner. Trump went on to say that Jack Smith, the special counsel appointed by the justice department in November 2022 to lead the prosecution and investigation into him, was deranged and “hell-bent on weaponizing the Justice Department.”
The former president was indicted by a grand jury on four charges related to his alleged effort to subvert the 2020 election, but his trial was derailed over a dispute about whether he enjoyed immunity from prosecution while in office. 
Mr Smith’s motion argues that Trump’s election meddling efforts were undertaken in a “private” capacity, and therefore not exempt from prosecution. 
Typically, such a motion would follow a filing by the defence. However, in a move described as unusual by legal experts, the presiding judge allowed Mr Smith’s team to pre-empt Trump’s motion, allowing Mr Smith to outline his case just over a month before the US election.
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A former lawyer for Donald Trump said the timing of the new court filing “could be better” given the fact that the election is just weeks away.
Timothy Parlatore, who worked for the former president while he was the subject of a probe into his “election interference” case, told CNN: “The timing could be better, you know, for appearance’s purposes.
“They asked for a briefing schedule that this was filed a few weeks ago, and then it took a few weeks for it to be unsealed. It’s very detailed.
“Donald Trump’s response isn’t going to be for another couple of weeks… we’re unlikely to be able to see his response to this until after the election.”
He continued: “People are reading this in the context of an election, not just in the context of criminal proceedings.”
On New Year’s day in 2021, Trump warned Mike Pence that people would “hate your guts” and “think you’re stupid” if his vice president did not intervene in Congress’ certification of Joe Biden’s victory, according to the filing.
Donald Trump has fired out a barrage of Truth Social posts after new documents in his “election interference” case were made public.
Jack Smith has a reputation as a dogged prosecutor. In his appointment as an independent special counsel, he has proved his determination to pursue his case against Donald Trump.
The 165-page brief, filed last week but only publicly revealed today, is most likely Mr Smith’s final opportunity to detail his case against Trump before the election.
There will not be a trial anytime soon – or perhaps ever, if Trump returns to the White House. The Justice Department’s long-standing policy is that sitting presidents cannot face prosecution. 
Donald Trump said he would “fight like hell” to stay in power whether he won or lost the 2020 presidential election, according to the new documents.
According to a White House staffer travelling with Trump, some time after he began “spreading false fraud claims”, he told family members: “It doesn’t mater if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.”
Prosecutors cite it as one of a number of pieces of evidence that show that the former president knew the claims he was making about the election being “stolen” were untrue.
Trump’s White House staffer told the then-president they could “find no support” for his election fraud claims because they were all “bulls—”.
The employee, who is referred to as P9 in the partially redacted document, told Trump the claims would get “slaughtered” in court.
In August last year, Trump was charged with four counts relating to his alleged attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The case was put on hold while the former president’s claim that he was protected from prosecution made its way through the courts.
In the Supreme Court this summer, justices ruled that Trump was immune from prosecution for conduct involving his interactions with the Justice Department.
Jack Smith filed a superseding indictment in August which kept the four initial charges against Trump but narrowed the scope of the allegations.
Trump and his co-conspirators continued to make false claims about election fraud “even after they had been publicly disproven” and advisers told him they were untrue.
The former president is accused of making “unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing claims” of election fraud, such as that large numbers of dead or eligible voters had cast ballots.
The court filing alleges Trump “knew his fraud claims were false” because a White House staffer and Mike Pence told him they were not true.
Trump was told by one aide, who is referred to as P9 in the filing, that he “could not mount successful legal challenges to the election”.
When Trump said he would only pay his lawyer if he “succeeded”, P9 told him “he would never have to pay” him anything, to which Trump laughed and said “we’ll see”.
After P9 again told the defendant he would be unable to prove his false fraud allegations in court, Trump is said to have replied: “The details don’t matter.”
When Alexi Schacht was asked to defend Manzoor Qadar, who was accused of murdering his niece’s husband as part of an honour killing, he thought it would be a doddle.
The prosecution was relying on “thin” circumstantial evidence to prove his client had travelled from Blackburn, Lancashire, in 1996 to shoot Shaukat Parvez dead in Queens in exchange for a £46,000 bounty.
So confident was Mr Schacht that the case would fall apart, he branded it at the time as “one of the weakest prosecutions I’ve ever seen”.
But the one thing the lawyer hadn’t factored into the trial at Brooklyn federal court was his opponent: Jack Smith.
Read the full profile from Susie Coen, our US Correspondent, here.
Donald Trump said “so what” when Mike Pence was rushed to safety during the Capitol riots, a new court filing reveals.
Trump, then the US president, was told that his vice president had been forced to flee the Capitol on January 6 2021 as rioters burst in, according to court documents filed by special counsel Jack Smith.
A US judge has made the 165-page document public, in which prosecutors lay out their evidence that allegedly shows Trump illegally tried to overturn his 2020 election defeat.
It reads: “Upon receiving a phone call alerting him that Pence had been taken to a secure location, [redacted] rushed to the dining room to inform the defendant [Trump] in hopes that the defendant would take action to ensure Pence’s safety.
“Instead, after [redacted] delivered the news, the defendant looked at him and said only, “So what?”
Trump’s private operatives “sought to create chaos” at polling stations where votes were still being counted.
One campaign employee and alleged co-conspirator “tried to sow confusion” at a polling station in Detroit, Michigan, which looked “unfavourable” for Trump.
When a colleague told the campaign operative, who is named as P5 in the court filing, “we think [a batch of votes heavily in Biden’s favour is] right”, they responded: “find a reason it isn’t”, “give me options to file litigation” and “even if itbis [sic]”.
When the colleague said there could be “unrest”, P5 replied: “make them riot” and “do it!!!”
Trump’s campaign staff are said to have used “similar tactics” at other tabulation centres, which the then-president used to claim his “election observers were being denied proper access.”
Mike Pence encouraged Donald Trump to see his 2020 election defeat not as a “loss” but an “intermission”.
In November 12 2020, the former vice president told Trump that he should not concede but “recognise [that the] process is over”.
At a lunch four days later, Mr Pence encouraged him to accept the election results. The former president is said to have responded: “I don’t know, 2024 is so far-off.”
On December 21, the then-vice president “encouraged” Trump “not to look at the election ‘just as a loss – just an intermission.’”
Later the same day, Mr Pence told him “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, [you] should ‘take a bow.’”
Trump’s private political advisor told a group of supporters the then-president’s strategy was to “declare himself a winner”.
Three days before the election, the aide said: “And what Trump’s going to do is just declare victory. Right? He’s going to declare victory.
“That doesn’t mean he’s the winner, he’s just going to say he’s the winner”.
He said Trump was going to “take advantage” of Joe Biden’s supporters favouring mail-in ballots.
According to the court filing, he added: “that’s our strategy. He’s going to declare himself a winner.”
Trump told his advisors he would “simply declare victory before the ballots were counted” when he was told the 2020 race would be close.
His team warned him that while he might appear to be in the lead initially, it would “diminish” when mail-in ballots were counted.
Trump then publicly began to “plant the seeds” for the false declaration, according to the filing.
Republicans are likely to frame the submission of the new court documents in Donald Trump’s “election interference” case as an attempt to influence the 2024 presidential election, which is now just over a month away.
The Trump campaign has told CNN that the court documents were submitted because Democrats are rattled by JD Vance’s performance in the vice presidential debate last night.
Donald Trump is yet to offer a comment himself via his Truth Social platform.
After losing to Joe Biden in the 2020 election, Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office”.
He launched “a series of increasingly desperate plans” to try and overturn the election results, prosecutors allege.
They claim Trump’s efforts included lying to state officials to “induce them to ignore true vote counts” and “manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states.”
He is also accused of trying to “enlist” Mike Pence to obstruct the certification of the election.
Prosecutors also accuse Trump of “directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification” on 6 January 2021.
An unnamed Trump campaign official urged colleagues to “make them riot” and “do it” when it was suggested their election theft claims could spark violence.
Campaign officials were discussing whether false claims from Donald Trump that he had won the 2020 election could result in scenes similar to the Brooks Brothers Riot, a violent attempt to stop the vote count in Florida after the 2000 presidential election.
Supporters of Mr Trump eventually launched a violent siege of the Capitol Building on January 6, 2021, two months after his election defeat.
The details were revealed in new court documents in the case accusing Mr Trump of subverting the election released on Wednesday.