Trump: “It Was a Rigged Election”

by Sharon Rondeau

(Oct. 3, 2024) — In the wake of the release of a new Special Counsel filing claiming he resorted to “criminal activity” in objecting to the announced results of the 2020 election, on Thursday at a rally in Saginaw, MI, 2024 Republican presidential nominee and 45th president Donald J. Trump told the assembled crowd, “We won; we won. It was a rigged election.”

A live broadcast of the rally is here.

Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose appointment in July was ruled unconstitutional by U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Florida Aileen Cannon, not only challenged that ruling but also went on to file a revised set of charges prompted by the U.S. Supreme Court’s July 1 ruling that sitting presidents enjoy protection, or “immunity,” from criminal prosecution stemming from their execution of official duties.

“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to
overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct. Not so,” Smith began his 165-page brief filed with and released by Judge Tanya Chutkan of the U.S. District Court for the District of Washington, DC on Wednesday. “Although the defendant was the incumbent President during the charged conspiracies, his scheme
was fundamentally a private one. Working with a team of private co-conspirators, the defendant acted as a candidate when he pursued multiple criminal means to disrupt, through fraud and deceit, the government function by which votes are collected and counted—a function in which the defendant, as President, had no official role.”

Trump has denied all of the accusations.

An Obama appointee and supporter and native of Jamaica, Chutkan claimed during a hearing in the case of Trump’s presidential records that “impartiality is bedrock,” while “delivering a swift and sharp rebuke about the limits of his ability as former president to invoke executive privilege,” according to The New York Times.

Trump’s appeal on the issue of presidential immunity to the Supreme Court, Trump v. United States, 144 S. Ct. 2312 (2024), Smith recounted, resulted in the court’s ruling that “presidents are immune from prosecution for certain official conduct—including the defendant’s use of the Justice Department in furtherance of his scheme, as was alleged in the original indictment—and remanded to this Court to determine whether the remaining allegations against the defendant are immunized. The answer to that question is no.”

In its opinion, the high court wrote, in part:

In dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives. Such a “highly intrusive” inquiry would risk exposing even the most obvious instances of official conduct to judicial examination on the mere allegation of improper purpose. Fitzgerald, 457 U. S., at 756. Nor may courts deem an action unofficial
merely because it allegedly violates a generally applicable law. Otherwise, Presidents would be subject to trial on “every allegation that an action was unlawful,” depriving immunity of its intended effect.

The ruling remanded the 2020 election issue to Chutkan for review.

The Times previously reported Smith intends to prosecute the case “until Inauguration Day if the former president wins” over Democrat Kamala Harris.

“When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay
in office,” Smith claimed on page 3. “With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost—Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin (the “targeted states”).”

The filing asks Chutkan to review Trump’s “conduct” in the post-election period and rule in favor of the former president’s having to “stand trial on the superseding indictment.”