Topline
Former President Donald Trump fired his attorneys after the 2020 election and replaced them with Rudy Giuliani because he would be willing to “spread knowingly false claims of election fraud,” Special Counsel Jack Smith alleged in a wide-ranging filing on Trump’s efforts to overturn the election, which claims Trump knew full well his election claims were false.
Former President Donald Trump and former NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani shake hands as they attend the … [+] annual 9/11 Commemoration Ceremony at the National 9/11 Memorial and Museum on September 11 in New York City.
Key Facts
Smith filed a new brief in the federal criminal case against Trump for trying to overturn the election, which was made public Tuesday and lays out the government’s case against Trump and why it complies with the Supreme Court’s ruling giving the ex-president some immunity from criminal charges.
Prosecutors allege Trump fired his previous attorney after the 2020 election on Nov. 13, 2020, after the lawyer and Trump’s staff told him he had only a “slim chance” of winning the election—prompting Trump to fire his attorney and hire an unnamed co-conspirator believed to be Giuliani to head his legal team, with Smith alleging Trump hired Giuliani because he “was willing to falsely claim victory and spread knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
The filing alleges Trump knew his claims of election fraud were false, with a different Trump attorney telling the then-president that they would get “slaughtered” if they tried to litigate the claims in court because the allegations were “bullshit”—with Smith also claiming that when the lawyer told Trump they couldn’t prove his claims in court, Trump responded, “The details don’t matter.”
Trump and his allies invented their fraud claims “out of whole cloth,” Smith alleges, noting prosecutors would show at trial how they “repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day” and made up “false figure[s] that they never verified or corroborated.”
This story is breaking and will be updated.