On Election Day 2012, and even before the polls closed, Donald Trump had everything he wanted his supporters to know about the final election results: a conspiracy underway to deny victory to Republicans.
“There are other reports of voting machines changing votes from Romney to Obama,” Trump wrote on what was then known as Twitter. “Be very careful with the machines, don’t let them steal your vote. “
Special counsel Jack Smith’s prosecutors referenced that tweet in a recent filing in the Jan. 6 case in D. C. They painted a global picture of the outrageous lies Trump has resorted to over the years to degrade trust in elections.
Trump made the same claim that a foreign-backed cybervote was “flipping” his defense in this case, requesting a series of subpoenas from federal agencies. He hopes to show, he said, that he had an intelligent explanation for why repositioning on the ballot took a stand in 2020.
But this argument has also allowed the government to show the lengths to which it has gone to debunk the myth of cyber interference. In a filing over the weekend, the special counsel said his team had questioned more than a dozen former national security, intelligence and law enforcement officials. officials if there was any evidence of allegations of foreign interference and vote replacement in the 2020 election.
“The answer from each and every official is no,” federal prosecutors wrote.
As far-fetched as the cyber intrusion allegations may seem, Trump appears willing to keep pushing those allegations while his case goes to trial. This is as much a rhetorical defense as it is a legal strategy. For Trump, those allegations of assistance claims maintain the concept that he had a valid explanation for why the votes may also have been reversed, and therefore that he had a valid explanation for why he had won.
There has never been any genuine evidence to back up Trump’s claims, and a mountain of denials and debunks to contradict them. But after the 2020 election, Trump’s accusations of foreign-backed cyber interference continued to ricochet among the far right, giving rise to an expanded universe of spy stories about foreign interference, similar to A Comic Book. One featured an alleged shooting over election cloth at a U. S. Army installation in Germany; Sidney Powell raised this issue during a famous press conference with Rudy Giuliani at RNC headquarters.
Italygate, the theory that an Italian defense contractor is using military satellites to hijack Trump and pro-Biden votes, piqued the interest of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Meadows and Rep. Scott Perry (R-PA) as they searched for tactics to explain. Rule out Trump’s defeat and conduct investigations that may make it difficult to understand the valid result.
Trump’s attorneys have picked up the thread and brought it into federal court. In filings last month, they disclosed subpoenas to the Justice Department, Director of National Intelligence, and other agencies, saying that they needed information from the federal government to show breaches and interference in the 2020 vote.
In debunking the conspiracy theory, the special counsel’s team not only leaked interviews with more than a dozen national security and law enforcement officials, but also criticized Trump for failing to distinguish between voting machines and vote-registration websites, and for insinuating that other cybersecurity breaches that hit the federal government in 2020 may simply be an election.
“While no country or cyber actor changed a single vote in a machine, there were isolated cases of foreign countries stealing registration data to target voters with disinformation—actions that constituted foreign influence, not interference,” federal prosecutors wrote, calling Trump’s claims an attempt “to manufacture confusion.”
The special suggestion adds in the filing that Trump had “consistently spread lies” after the 2020 election that votes had shifted from him to Biden. Despite denials from all who are in a position to know or determine those claims, Trump has continued.
For Smith, it shows a recognition of the strategies to which Trump has returned over the years to avoid accountability. In this case, Smith described what Trump was doing as trying to becloud the court.
“The court does not accept the defendant’s attempts to confuse the case when it does not exist,” prosecutors wrote.
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