Donald Trump knew he was lying about 2020 election fraud, prosecutors say in the indictment. Proving it would help convince a jury to convict him.
The latest indictment against Donald Trump goes to great lengths to argue that the former president knew he was lying when he repeatedly insisted that the 2020 election was stolen from him by fraud.
According to the indictment, Trump knew that his opponent Joe Biden won the contest, but lied anyway in a last-ditch effort to cling to power.
Trump and six alleged co-conspirators disseminated “prolific lies,” falsely claiming that large numbers of dead or ineligible voters had cast ballots and that voting machines switched votes from him to now-President Biden, among a host of other conspiracy theories, the indictment alleges. Those lies, according to the indictment, underpinned criminal conspiracies to impede Congress’s certification of votes and to rob Americans of their right to vote and have their votes counted.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment says.
The indictment’s focus on Trump’s self-awareness — the word “knowingly” appears 26 times in the text — has led some legal observers to question whether anyone can prove that Trump knew he lost the election when he continues to maintain that he is the true winner.
“At the heart of the case is really a metaphysical question of whether it’s even possible for Donald Trump to believe that he lost the election, or lost anything else, for that matter,” DC attorney Robert Kelner told the .
But that metaphysical question is largely beside the point, according to Ryan Goodman, a law professor at New York University.
Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges with a federal grand jury in Washington, DC, doesn’t need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election, Goodman told Insider. But it would help.
“Many of these allegations are not dependent upon that. I do think there’s an oddity in the indictment, that it makes it seem as though it is central,” Goodman told Insider. “I just think it’s Jack Smith saying, ‘If I need to prove beyond a reasonable doubt, I can.’ If he does prove that Trump knew he lost, then it’s off to the races.”Proving Trump knew he was lying helps prove criminal intent
Convincing a jury that Trump knew the election results were legitimate would be one of several ways that Smith could prove Trump acted with criminal intent.
Trump will almost certainly argue that he thought otherwise. The former president maintains, to this day — even after a second impeachment and numerous lawsuits against him and his allies — that he was the true victor of the 2020 election, by a landslide. He’s claimed that the supposed “Massive Fraud” of the election even “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” Trump has denied the allegations against him and is set to formally enter a plea on Thursday afternoon.
Attorneys have succeeded in discrediting Trump’s claims in court before. Earlier this year, he lost a civil lawsuit brought by E. Jean Carroll, who alleged Trump sexually abused her in the 1990s.
