Special counsel Jack Smith’s redacted briefing this week arguing Donald Trump isn’t immune from prosecution in his federal election interference case takes direct aim at lies Trump and his allies have spread about noncitizens voting in federal elections.
Trump and the GOP have staked their election hopes this cycle in part on anti-immigrant fearmongering, and in particular, false claims that Democrats are bringing undocumented immigrants to the United States to have them vote illegally.
Donald Trump again pushes the false claim that Democrats are signing up illegal immigrants to vote:
— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) October 1, 2024
“There’s a reason why they let all these people in because they want to get them to vote. That’s the reason.” pic.twitter.com/jE0G8mwHQk
In reality, these plainly racist claims align with the “replacement theory” nonsense we’ve seen pushed by far-right personalities and referenced in mass shooters’ screeds. And Smith’s court filing takes direct aim at these claims. On Page 15, the filing references a White House staffer who allegedly overheard Trump tell family members that “it doesn’t matter if you won or lost the election. You still have to fight like hell.” And in the next line, Smith’s team explains how the Trump campaign’s accusations about noncitizen voters were part of that strategy.
The proof, according to Smith’s team, is that the Trump campaign’s numbers kept changing.
According to the filing:
The defendant and his co-conspirators also demonstrated their deliberate disregard for the truth—and thus their knowledge of falsity—-when they repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day. At trial, the Government will introduce several instances of this pattern, in which the defendant and conspirators’ lies were proved by the fact that they made up figures from whole cloth. One example concerns the defendant and conspirators’ claims about non-citizen voters in Arizona. The conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 non-citizens voted in Arizona; five days later, it was “beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote”; three weeks later, “the bare minimum [was] 40 or 50,000. The reality is about 250,000”; days after that, the assertion was 32,000; and ultimately, the conspirators landed back where they started, at 36,000—a false figure that they never verified or corroborated.
Each of the numbers listed comes with redacted footnotes that appear to reference when and where these claims were made. It seems like Smith has zeroed in on Trump’s tendency to spew fake statistics to bolster his claims in public. And the filing suggests Smith intends to use that against Trump and his associates while blowing a hole in one of the most bigoted lies of Trump’s 2020 and 2024 campaigns.
Joy Reid broke it down further on Thursday’s episode of “The ReidOut,” in a segment with NBC News’ Vaughn Hillyard. Check it out here:
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog.