“I don’t know if Trump knew he’d lost…...”
“I think he really thought he’d won…...”
“Why would he claim voter fraud, if it weren’t true?”
“Can Jack Smith really prove Trump knew he’d lost???”
“You can’t convict him, if he really thought he’d won…….”
Sound familiar?
Perhaps some of you even heard some of these excuses over Thanksgiving dinner last week.
Well, I’m sick to DEATH of hearing this sh*t, and that’s why I’m writing this diary.
The sheer weight of the evidence of Trump’s mens rea (before and) after the 2020 election is staggering. And I want to present this to you, to give you ammunition when talking to MAGA friends, relatives and coworkers.
First off:
mens re·a
/ˌmenz ˈrēə/ noun LAW
Mens rea refers to criminal intent. The literal translation from Latin is "guilty mind." The plural of mens rea is mentes reae. Mens rea is the state of mind statutorily required in order to convict a particular defendant of a particular crime.
So, let’s get this party started………
First, here are the well-documented people who told Trump he had lost the election:
And they’re ALL REPUBLICANS!!!
Vice President Mike Pence told him.
Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe told him.
Attorney General Bill Barr told him.
Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen told him.
White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told him.
ALL of the main news channels told him, INCLUDING Fox.
Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany told him.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell told him.
Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Chief Chris Krebs told him.
Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Kevin McCarthy told him.
Majority Leader of the Michigan Senate Mike Shirkey told him.
Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield told him.
Arizona Speaker of the House Rusty Bowers told him.
Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger told him he’d lost Georgia.
Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien told him.
Acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue told him.
Trump campaign data expert Matt Oczkowski told him.
Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon told him.
Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway told him.
Arizona Governor Doug Ducey told him, indirectly, by refusing to accept any more of Trump’s phone calls........and by signing Arizona’s slate of electors for Joe Biden.
All Republican state’s Sec’s of State who signed the electoral slates for the 2020 election, told him through certifying Biden’s victory in their states.
Some of these people have ALREADY testified before Special Counsel Jack Smith’s Jan6 grand jury.
And many of these people will TESTIFY, under oath, in the March 2024 Jan6 trial, that they told Trump he’d lost the election. Some of them even KEPT telling him up until Jan6.
Some of them even testified of this already, under oath, before the Jan6 Committee.
And many of the following people will TESTIFY, under oath, in the March 2024 Jan6 trial that they personally HEARD Trump acknowledge that he lost:
Assistant Chief of Staff Cassidy Hutchinson
White house aide Alyssa Farah
No “hearsay.” No rumors. No scuttlebutt. No bullsh*t. Just first-hand witnesses who will testify UNDER OATH, and under threat of perjury charges, that Trump acknowledged, or acted as if he knew, he’d lost.
www.politico.com/...
Former Attorney General Bill Barr
Barr told the committee that, following the November election, he had three discussions with Trump about the results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff which I told the president was bullshit. I didn’t want to be a part of it and that’s one of the reasons I decided to leave when I did,” Barr said. “I observed, I think on Dec. 1, you can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view unsupported by specific evidence that there was fraud in the election.”
Former Trump campaign manager Bill Stepien
In a taped deposition from February, Stepien said he was among those who advised Trump not to declare victory on election night.
“The president disagreed with that,” he said. “I don’t recall the particular words. He thought I was wrong, he told me so, and that they were going to go in a different direction.”
Then, later in November, Stepien described Trump’s odds of legally winning the election, “very, very, very bleak.”
He said that a group told Trump their belief his chances of winning were around “five, maybe ten percent based on recounts that were automatically initiated or could be initiated based on realistic legal challenges.”
Ivanka Trump
Trump’s own family may have publicly supported the president, but privately they accepted the loss. However, it is unclear whether they told Trump to move on. At the same time Trump was challenging the election, Ivanka Trump and her husband Jared Kushner were preparing to move to Miami.
Trump’s daughter said she privately accepted assessments that her father lost the election as early as December. In an excerpt of a recording of her video deposition, she said Barr’s statement saying he found no evidence of election fraud had an impact on her thinking.
“It affected my perspective. I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying,” Trump said.
Acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue
The former Justice Department official went through claim after claim of election fraud with Trump, he told the committee. He told Trump, “much of the info you’re getting is false.”
“I tried to, again, put this in perspective and try to put it in very clear terms to the president. I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada,’” Donoghue said in a recorded interview shared by the committee. “‘We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.’”
Trump campaign data expert Matt Oczkowski
Trump adviser Jason Miller, who remains close to the ex-president, said he was in the Oval Office when Trump was told days after the election that county-by-county and state-by-state results were not in his favor.
“At some point in the conversation, Matt Oczkowski, who was the lead data person, was brought on, and I remember he delivered to the president in pretty blunt terms that he was going to lose,” Miller told the committee.
Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon
Tasked with reviewing voter fraud claims, Cannon said he told advisers to Trump and Vice President Mike Pence he found no evidence of election fraud. He said the same thing to Trump’s chief of staff, Mark Meadows, who asked him: “So there’s no there there?’”
At one point later, Pence asked him for an update on the campaign’s findings.
“I don’t remember his exact words, but he asked me if we were finding anything, and I said that I was not personally finding anything sufficient to alter the results of the election,” Cannon recalled. “He thanked me. That was our interaction.”
Cannon also suggested Trump’s trade adviser, Peter Navarro, played a role in pushing conspiracies of widespread fraud and said Navarro dismissed a Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report that found the “election secure.”
“I believe Mr. Navarro accused me of being an agent of the deep state working with [CISA director] Chris Krebs against the president.”
Trump counselor Kellyanne Conway
Although Conway has not come up in the Jan. 6 hearings (she left the White House in the summer of 2020), she wrote in her recently published memoir, “Here’s the Deal,” that she was one of the few people who told Trump he lost.
“I may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway wrote.
“The team had failed on November 3, and they failed again afterward. By not confronting the candidate with the grim reality of his situation, that the proof had not surfaced to support the claims, they denied him the evidence he sought and the respect he was due. Instead supplicant after sycophant after showman genuflected in front of the Resolute Desk and promised the president goods they could not deliver.”
Other damning evidence that Trump disregarded the truth.….
…..disregarded established facts. Disregarded the comments and pleas of dozens of white house staff, colleagues and campaign staff.
thehill.com/...
Besides persisting in his claims of election fraud after having been told by authoritative sources they were baseless, Trump showed in other ways that he was uninterested in facts and evidence:
- He pressured top Department of Justice officials, telling them, “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”
- Trump tried to install an ally as acting attorney general and have him send a letter to key states, falsely claiming the Department of Justice had found irregularities in some of the state election results, hoping to dissuade the states from assigning their electoral votes to Biden.
- Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes — just enough for Trump to win the state.
- When Raffensberger sought to give Trump the link to a site disproving one of his fraud claims, Trump responded, “I don’t care about a link, I don’t need it . . . . I have a much better link.”
- In a Jan. 4 White House meeting, after Trump lawyer John Eastman assured Vice President Pence he had “unilateral” authority to halt Congress’s electoral vote certification but, when pressed, admitted it had never been tested in court, Pence exclaimed to Trump, “Did you hear that? Even your own counsel is not saying I have the authority.” Trump replied, “That’s okay, I prefer the other suggestion,” that the vice president could act on his own to stop the official count.
- Just hours after Pence had insisted to Trump he lacked authority to intervene in the certification process, Trump sent out a patently false tweet telling supporters he and Pence were “in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”
- On Jan. 6, Trump falsely tweeted that many states wanted to “decertify” their electoral votes for Biden.
www.lawfaremedia.org/...
…..The committee did, however, present a great deal of evidence—in the June 9, June 13, and June 23 hearings—that credible actors repeatedly informed Trump that he had lost and that he was torturing reality in his public statements. That is, that he had every opportunity to know the truth, whether he was emotionally capable of internalizing that truth or not. The committee presented evidence, in fact, that Trump received this information from a diverse array of actors: his own campaign operatives, his campaign lawyers, senior Justice Department officials, and federal judges. At a minimum, the committee was persuasive that Trump had every reason to know that he had lost and simply chose not to accede to that reality but to propagate a falsehood instead.
This story begins before Election Day itself, in the committee’s presentation. “As early as April 2020, Mr. Trump claimed that the only way he could lose an election would be as a result of fraud,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren stated during the June 13 hearing, presenting public statements in which Trump explicitly made this claim and criticized the reliability of voting by mail. This fact presents perhaps the most powerful single piece of evidence that Trump’s claims of fraud after the election were a premeditated and preplanned response to defeat cooked up in the former president’s mind long before the election even happened. On April 8, 2020, for example, Trump alleged that fraud would occur with voting by mail, and a few months later, he claimed that “the only way we’re going to lose this election is if the election is rigged, remember that.”
And Trump didn’t even wait until after the election to set his plan in motion
Trump took other actions before Election Day that seemed designed to help his later fraud narrative. He actively discouraged mail-in voting, for example, despite the pleas of his campaign staff and senior Republicans. The committee revealed during the June 13 hearing that Trump’s campaign manager, Bill Stepien, was so concerned about the president’s discouragement of mail-in voting that he met with the president and Rep. Kevin McCarthy in the summer 2020 and the two “made our case” for why mail-in voting was not a bad thing for Trump’s campaign. Stepien argued that urging voters to vote only on Election Day would leave a lot to chance and that the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee, and the Republican Party all had the advantage of grassroots workers on the ground who could make mail-in voting work for the president. “But the president’s mind was made up,” Stepien said.
apnews.com/...
WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump was told the same thing over and over, by his campaign team, the data crunchers, and a steady stream of lawyers, investigators and inner-circle allies: There was no voting fraud that could have tipped the 2020 presidential election.
But in the eight weeks after losing to Joe Biden, the defeated Trump publicly, privately and relentlessly pushed his false claims of a rigged 2020 election and intensified an extraordinary scheme to overturn Biden’s victory. When all else failed in his effort to stay in power, Trump beckoned thousands of his supporters to Washington on Jan. 6, 2021, where extremists groups led the deadly Capitol siege.
The scale and virulence of that scheme began to take shape at the opening House hearing by the committee investigating 1/6. The prime-time hearing was watched by an estimated 20 million people on the TV networks, almost double the number who tuned in to the opening of Trump’s two impeachment trials.
apnews.com/...
PLANNING THE LIE AHEAD OF TIME
The Jan. 6 committee has made clear that Trump long planned to claim victory, whether he actually won or not. His allies were boasting of how they could try to fool the public to make it seem that he had won reelection. The committee cites correspondence from Tom Fitton of the conservative group Judicial Watch to the White House in October 2020 in which Fitton urges Trump to say after polls close: “We had an election. I won.”
The committee also obtained a recording of Trump adviser Steve Bannon, who told associates the week before the election that “what Trump’s gonna do is just declare victory, right? He’s gonna declare victory. But that doesn’t mean he’s a winner. He’s just gonna say he’s a winner.”
Trump had spent months demonizing mail voting, which swelled in popularity during the COVID-19 pandemic. The then-president also insisted the only way he would lose the election would be by massive voter fraud. When Trump did declare victory early in the morning the day after Election Day, he exploited a quirk in vote counting in which in-person votes, which leaned GOP, were tallied first, putting him temporarily ahead. He demanded that local election officials stop counting outstanding ballots, which leaned Democratic.
“President Trump’s decision to declare victory falsely on election night and, unlawfully, to call for the vote counting to stop, was not a spontaneous decision,” the committee wrote in the executive summary for its report. “It was premeditated.”
Now, let’s take a look at Jack Smith’s indictment:
www.washingtonpost.com/...
By Derek Hawkins and Tyler Remmel
August 2, 2023 at 8:57 p.m. EDT
As Donald Trump sought to overturn the results of the 2020 election, a chorus of top Republicans told him repeatedly that his claims of widespread voter fraud were false.
[...]
On multiple occasions, Trump allegedly summoned [AG Jeffrey] Rosen and [Acting DAG Richard] Donoghue to talk about a video that he and allies said showed election workers at State Farm Arena in Atlanta counting “suitcases” of illegal ballots. Per the indictment they told him that the activity in the footage was “benign,” saying later that investigators had reviewed the tape and had “not identified suspicious conduct.”
In at least two conversations, prosecutors allege that Trump told Rosen and Donoghue that he believed there had been 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania. “Each time, the Justice Department officials informed the defendant that his claim was false,” the indictment says.
Trump made similar claims, per the indictment, about Wisconsin that Rosen shot down. Rosen and Donoghue were also among the officials who allegedly told Trump that numerous audits had confirmed that voting machine tallies were accurate.
[John] Ratcliffe, Director of National Intelligence an adviser handpicked by Trump to brief him on national security matters, “disabused” Trump of the notion that “the Intelligence Community’s findings regarding foreign interference would change the outcome of the election,” the indictment says.
[Chris] Krebs, a Republican chosen by Trump to lead the newly formed agency, joined a multi-agency statement that said the 2020 election was the “most secure in American history” and said claims of computer-based election fraud were unsubstantiated.
On the evening of Jan. 6, 2021, after law enforcement quelled the violence at the Capitol, [White House Counsel Pat] Cipollone called on Trump to “withdraw any objections and allow the certification” of Biden’s victory, according to the indictment. Trump refused.
Per the indictment, [Mike] Shirkey and [Lee] Chatfield met with Trump in the Oval Office on Nov. 20, 2020, and heard Trump’s false claims about illegitimate voting in Detroit. They said afterward in a joint statement that they had “not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome” in the state.
[...]
Per the indictment Trump and his alleged co-conspirators claimed in conversations with Bowers that thousands of noncitizens, nonresidents and dead people had voted in Arizona.
Bowers told them investigations had uncovered no evidence of significant fraud in the state. He said in a Dec. 4, 2020, statement that it would violate his oath of office, “the basic principles of republican government, and the rule of law if we attempted to nullify the people’s vote based on unsupported theories of fraud.”
Other evidence (hearsay):
Former Rep. Liz Cheney (R-Wyo.) claims in her new book that Rep. Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) told her former President Trump acknowledged that he lost the 2020 presidential election just two days after the election, according to reports.
In her book “Oath and Honor,” obtained exclusively by CNN ahead of its scheduled release this upcoming Tuesday, Cheney rebukes the Republican Party and reveals new details about her experience in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
“He knows it’s over,” McCarthy told the former lawmaker after speaking with Trump, CNN reported.
“He needs to go through all the stages of grief,” he added.
But how could Kevin possibly know that three years later, Trump would still be stuck in Grief Stage #1 — Denial?
Well, perhaps a hint could have been that Trump said this, when asked if he would accept the results of the 2020 election: “I would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supporters and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election, if I win,”
But, people say Trump wasn’t the one doing all this. It was everyone else’s fault!1!
WASHINGTON, Sept 17 (Reuters) - Former U.S. President Donald Trump said he dismissed the views of his own lawyers in continuing to challenge his 2020 defeat because he did not respect them, saying in an interview aired on Sunday that he had made up his own mind that the election had been "rigged" - a false claim that he continues to make.
"It was my decision," Trump told NBC's "Meet the Press" program, that the election was "rigged" against him, adding that he relied heavily upon his own "instincts" in coming to that conclusion.
From the mouth of the BEAST himself.
“Instincts.” Not facts.
All of these REPUBLICANS, inside and outside his administration and his campaign, told him the truth.
And he just wouldn’t listen……..
….
……….
But Trump DID listen to:
The Overstock.com president.
The MyPillow Guy.
A female lawyer who Trump himself admitted was “crazy.”
A severely alcoholic lawyer who told him on election night, in slurred words: “Just say you won!”
A power-hungry AAG and CIVIL Environmental Section DOJ lawyer.
An economics PhD
A low-level DOJ employee who has stated: “more guns = less crime.”
Claims of Chapman University School of Law dean, who admitted his plan would be unsuccessful.
An outside legal “advisor.”
And yet another long-time Trump “lawyer.”
And…………..his own…………...”instincts.”
An A+ to anyone who can successfully name ALL of them
Five of the people above are now co-defendants of Trump, in a state criminal court case. And most of them are also un-indicted co-conspirators of Trump in a federal criminal case.
Friday, Feb. 9th, 2024 — Jury selection is scheduled to begin for Trump’s DC trial.
Friday, March 1st, 2024 — DC trial begins
Read the indictment
Read it.
READ IT!!!!!!!!
“Justice without strength, is helpless. Strength without justice is tyrannical.” — Blaise Pascal (paraphrased)