How Jack Smith Plans to Use a Damning 2020 Phone Call Against Trump

Special counsel Jack Smith plans to use Donald Trump’s 2020 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as evidence against the former president in his Washington, D.C., election fraud trial.

On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan released Smith’s findings in the case to the public, and within the redacted 165-page document is the prosecutor’s contention that Trump’s infamous phone call does not fall under presidential immunity as defined by the Supreme Court in its July 1 ruling.

The Supreme Court ruling contended that a U.S. president is immune from “official acts” conducted in their capacity as the nation’s chief executive, dealing a major obstacle to the multiple legal cases against Trump. The former president was initially indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election back in August 2023, but after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Smith filed a superseding indictment, over a year later, taking the expansion of immunity into account.

In his 2020 call to Raffensperger, Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In his legal filing, Smith argues that the phone call “was purely a private one, which [Trump] undertook as a candidate and the plaintiff in a lawsuit,” noting that a federal district court already determined that it was a “campaign call rather than official business.”

Smith’s filing also points out, “Under the Constitution, the Executive Branch has no constitutionally assigned role in the state-electoral process. To the contrary, the constitutional framework excludes the president from that process to protect against electoral abuses.”

Smith is hoping that this case against the former president—arguably the most damning of the criminal charges against him—can withstand the Supreme Court’s constraints on what criminal charges a president can actually face. Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in 2020 led to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and he has not faced any legal consequences for his involvement with the riot. He still refuses to commit to accepting the results of an election in which he loses.

There’s no telling what Trump will do if the 2024 election doesn’t go his way, and that is in part because he still has not faced legal consequences for his actions in the last presidential election. Smith is hoping that Trump can finally face accountability and to ensure that American elections are never threatened again.

A federal judge unsealed a 165-page motion pertaining to Donald Trump’s January 6 trial on Wednesday, revealing details and co-conspirators connected to the former president’s 2020 election subversion scheme.

The redacted filing from special counsel Jack Smith outlines what his office describes as Trump’s “private criminal conduct.”

”At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private one,” prosecutors wrote in the motion. “He extensively used private actors and his campaign infrastructure to attempt to overturn the election results and operated in a private capacity as a candidate for office.”

The massive motion is broken into four separate sections: the first section outlines Smith’s offices case against Trump, while the second creates a roadmap to aid Judge Tanya Chutkan in determining which actions undertaken by Trump were considered “official,” due to a July Supreme Court ruling that redefined executive protections by expanding the definition of presidential immunity.

The third section of Smith’s motion ties in how the principles will apply to Trump’s case, and the fourth section features a conclusion requesting Chutkan to rule that the actions outlined in the entirety of the document do not fall within the fresh definition of immunity.

The document provides insight into some of the salacious details collected by prosecutors as they’ve built their case against Trump, including that the former president sidelined his 2020 campaign legal team that November in favor of Rudy Giuliani on the basis that the since-disbarred attorney was willing to lie about the election results.

At one point, Smith details how a Trump campaign employee was informed that a final batch of ballots at a Detroit vote-counting center would favor Joe Biden. “Find a reason it isn’t,” the staffer said. “Give me options to file litigation.”

When a colleague warned doing so could spark unrest, the staffer replied, “Make them riot.”

Smith’s motion also indicates that the special counsel intends to prove Trump and his allies baselessly invented claims that noncitizens were voting in U.S. elections, and ignored indications that their theory that dead Americans were casting their votes was flat-out wrong.

The motion further reveals that the MAGA politicos failed to deliver on their own election fraud theories. They promised to “package up” evidence of the election-stealing crime and then never delivered it to its intended recipients, namely former Arizona Governor Doug Ducey and Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, where two prongs of the scheme have resulted in sprawling election conspiracy cases.

This story has been updated.

Almost 100 health volunteers who worked in Gaza demanded a U.S. arms sales embargo to Israel Wednesday in a letter to President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris. 

“President Biden and Vice President Harris, we are 99 American physicians and nurses who have witnessed crimes beyond comprehension. Crimes that we cannot believe you wish to continue supporting,” stated the letter, which was obtained by HuffPost. 

The letter included first-hand accounts of the brutality that the doctors, nurses, midwives, surgeons, and other health care practitioners had seen during their collective 254 weeks serving in Gaza’ hospitals. The tragedy is a direct result of Israel’s nearly year-long military campaign in Gaza, which has reportedly killed more than 41,500 Palestinians, including at least 16,500 children.

The letter noted that the death toll is likely significantly higher than what is reported by the Gaza Health Ministry.

“I’ve never seen such horrific injuries, on such a massive scale, with so few resources. Our bombs are cutting down women and children by the thousands. Their mutilated bodies are a monument to cruelty,” said Dr. Feroze Sidhwa, a trauma and critical care surgeon at San Joaquin General Hospital in Stockton, California. Sidhwa spent two weeks volunteering in Khan Younis, where an Israeli strike killed 51 people just on Tuesday. 

“With only marginal exceptions, everyone in Gaza is sick, injured, or both. This includes every national aid worker, every international volunteer, and probably every Israeli hostage: every man, woman, and child,” the letter said.

The letter urged Biden and Harris to “withhold military, economic, and diplomatic support from the State of Israel and to participate in an international arms embargo of Israel and all Palestinian armed groups until a permanent ceasefire is established in Gaza.” 

“We appreciate that you are working on a ceasefire agreement between Israel and Hamas, but you have overlooked an obvious fact: the United States can impose a ceasefire on the warring parties by simply stopping arms shipments to Israel, and announcing that we will participate in an international arms embargo on both Israel and all Palestinian armed groups,” the letter said. “We stress what many others have repeatedly told you over the past year: American law is perfectly clear on this matter, continuing to arm Israel is illegal.”

Last month, a report found that Secretary of State Antony Blinken had received reports from USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration detailing how Israel had deliberately blocked humanitarian aid from reaching Palestinians in Gaza, but still told Congress the exact opposite. The State Department even recommended that shipments of nearly $830 million in weapons and bombs to Israel, paid by U.S. taxpayers, ought to be frozen under the Foreign Assistance Act.

Harris has not signaled a significant break with Biden on his policy of empowering Israel’s violence in the Middle East, as Israel has launched a ground offensive into Lebanon, sparking missile strikes from Iran and threatening to blossom into regional war.  

On Wednesday, State Department spokesperson Matthew Miller was confronted during a press conference over whether the United States was using leverage to rein in Israel’s bombing of Lebanon and Gaza.

BBC News reporter Tom Bateman cited a diary entry from Republican President Ronald Reagan in 1982, where Reagan phoned Israel’s prime minister at the time, Menachem Begin, and told him to stop Israel’s shelling of Beirut. Bateman asked Miller if U.S. officials were similarly doing everything they could for a cease-fire.

Miller claimed in his reply that during the current conflict, U.S. intervention had led Israel “to take steps that they were not previously doing” regarding humanitarian access and “the shape of their military operations.”

“I do think it is often simplistic to reduce the … understanding of what’s happening to the bilateral relationship between two countries,” Miller added.

Bateman followed up, noting that Begin stopped bombing Lebanon 20 minutes after Reagan’s phone call. Miller deflected.

“I think we have made clear on a number of occasions with the government of Israel what we believe, and there have been times when our intervention has led to direct action by the government of Israel. There are times when they have disagreements with us,” Miller said. “And by the way, that was true in the Reagan administration too.”

Miller’s comments seem to show an unwillingness by President Biden and his administration to use any kind of leverage—such as the billions of dollars in weapons sales or the billions in foreign aid to Israel—to compel Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to curtail Israel’s military actions in Lebanon or Gaza.

In 1982, Reagan’s administration halted cluster-bomb shipments to Israel over their use on civilian areas in Lebanon. Reagan then followed with a phone call to Begin where he used language that would seem unfathomable by any American politician today.

“Here, on our television, night after night, our people are being shown the symbols of this war, and it is a holocaust,” Reagan told the Israeli prime minister, warning that it was endangering the U.S.-Israeli relationship. It had an immediate effect, with the bombing not only stopping but with Begin pleading with Reagan not to harm ties between the two countries.

Biden initially spurned months of calls for a cease-fire in Gaza, and still continues to back Israel in its brutal war that has claimed at least 41.000 Palestinian lives. Now Israel, thanks to a green light from the Biden administration, has expanded the war to Lebanon and killed hundreds of lives just in the past week. Biden can call for an arms embargo against Israel at any time, but as Miller’s comments illustrate, he won’t even touch the idea.

An Arizona judge torched a legal request by Rudy Giuliani in the fixer’s fake elector case Wednesday, ruling that the ex-Trump aide had “not one scintilla” of evidence to question the legitimacy of a grand jury assigned to his lawsuit.

Last month, Giuliani filed a request demanding information about the grand jury, alleging that the group was politically compromised and biased. But the judge overseeing the case, Maricopa County Superior Court Judge Bruce Cohen, wasn’t impressed by the conjecture-laden inquiry.

“The underlying claim that formulates the request is based upon pure speculation and abject conjecture,” Cohen wrote. “He alleges not one scintilla of information that would support this claim.”

Further still, Cohen noted that this particular grand jury was not specifically crafted to oversee Giuliani’s case but was rather a sitting grand jury, further shrinking the likelihood that it was arranged specifically to malign Giuliani and his co-defendants.

“There is therefore no reliable information to suggest that the empaneling of this grand jury occurred in contemplation of this case or with a political agenda in mind,” Cohen wrote.

Giuliani was one of nearly two dozen Trump allies indicted for their alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election, including Trump White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and attorneys Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, and Christina Bobb.

The indictment charged 18 individuals, some of whose names have been redacted, with orchestrating a scheme to use fake electors to flip Arizona’s 2020 election results over to Donald Trump. It also names Trump as an unindicted co-conspirator. All of the indicted individuals face the same slew of charges, which includes counts for conspiracy, forgery, fraudulent schemes and practices, and fraudulent schemes and artifices—the last of which holds a potential sentence of up to five years in prison.

Tim Scott continues to be a laughingstock of the Republican Party with his latest comments.

Joining CNBC’s Squawk Box on Tuesday, Scott made the entire roundtable laugh when he desperately tried to defend Donald Trump’s economic plans.

“Do you agree with all the tariffs?” Joe Kernen asked, referring to Trump’s isolationist economic agenda. “John Deere, 200 percent? Do you think companies that make stuff here should be at 15 percent tax? That’s industrial policy, isn’t it?”

“I believe that President Trump often times talks in the abstract,” the South Carolina senator responded.

CNBC hosts laughed at the ridiculous nonanswer. “What are we supposed to believe then?” asked one journalist.

“Believe his performance,” said Scott. “Believe what we saw from 2017 to 2020.” He then proceeded to stumble over words and throw out numbers about jobs Trump brought home.

“Obviously, that excludes Covid,” said the CNBC host, referring to the devastation the economy and everyday people endured while Trump was president in 2020—as well as its effects on how we compare economic numbers under the Trump and Biden administrations.

While Trump’s team continues to slam Joe Biden and Kamala Harris on the economy, as the hosts pointed out, they want economists and pundits to cherry-pick the highlights of Trump’s time as president.

It’s not a surprise that Scott can’t defend Trump’s economic plan. When Scott was running for president last year, he openly criticized Trump’s tariff plan on the campaign trail. “An across-the-board 10 percent [tariff would] increase … the cost of everything,” Scott told The New York Post a year ago. “In the current inflationary environment [that] would not be helpful.”

In reality, experts are warning that Trump’s economic plans, including his new tariff policies, might be even more harmful during a second go-around.

“Despite his ‘make the foreigners pay’ rhetoric, this package of policies does more damage to the US economy than to any other in the world,” wrote independent nonprofit nonpartisan researchers at the Peterson Institute in a report from September.

During a disjointed, low-energy speech on Tuesday evening, just before the vice presidential debate, Donald Trump made time to disrespect service members injured during his presidency.

At a campaign stop in Milwaukee, Trump was asked about Iran’s recent ballistic missile attacks on Israel, following Israel’s attacks on Lebanon and Gaza.

“Do you think Israel should retaliate to these missile attacks from Iran? But also do you believe that you should have been tougher on Iran after they had launched ballistic missiles in 2020 on U.S. forces in Iraq, leaving more than 100 U.S. soldiers injured?” asked a reporter.

“So first of all, ‘injured’—what does ‘injured’ mean? You mean, because they had a headache? Because the bombs never hit the fort,” responded Trump.

“There was nobody ever tougher on Iraq,” he continued, confusing the two countries.

Following the U.S. assassination of Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in January 2020, Iran attacked the Al Asad Airbase in neighboring Iraq, and more than 100 U.S. soldiers were left with brain injury symptoms. Some were evacuated to Germany for medical treatment, and nearly 80 troops received Purple Hearts for injuries related to the Iranian attacks.

This isn’t the first time Trump has disparaged injured U.S. troops—and it likely won’t be the last. His disrespect was so flagrant that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz mentioned it early on in the vice presidential debate, telling the American people that “when Iranian missiles did fall near U.S. troops and they received traumatic brain injuries, Donald Trump wrote it off as ‘headaches.’”

Later on in his Tuesday speech, Trump described the attack as a “very nice thing.”

We’ll see if these comments on soldiers get as much attention as Trump’s “suckers” and “losers” remarks.

North Carolina Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson was the lone state lawmaker who did not approve Governor Roy Cooper’s request to declare Hurricane Helene an emergency and mobilize emergency services ahead of the deadly storm.

As Hurricane Helene approached North Carolina last week, Cooper requested approval from the nine-person Council of State to act under the North Carolina Emergency Management Act, WRAL reported Tuesday.* Within hours, all but one member had responded: Robinson.

Robinson, a Trump-endorsed alleged porn enthusiast and self-declared “Black NAZI” who is currently running for governor, has spent the week since needling Cooper over the state’s emergency response—which Robinson himself apparently helped dampen.

Robinson posted on X Sunday that “the time for politics is over. We are talking about saving people’s lives here.” Then why did he not approve Cooper’s emergency request?

Former North Carolina Governor Pat McCrory told WRAL that Robinson’s lack of response to Cooper’s emergency request was “inexcusable in a time of crisis.”

“This is not a time for criticism,” McCrory said. “This is a time for working together as a team and asking how you can help. I’m sure there are people who feel stranded out there, but right now is not the time to start throwing arrows.”

Robinson responded Wednesday to WRAL’s report. “When Hurricane Helene was on its way to North Carolina, Gov. Cooper was too busy hob-knobing with rich folks in New York to care about preparing for the storm,” Robinson wrote on X.

“Now Democrats like Cooper, Josh Stein & Joe Biden want to hide behind bureaucratic resolutions that pass automatically—instead of getting out there and working to help people in dire need. I won’t stand for this,” Robinson wrote. “While they are playing politics, my team and I remain committed to doing all we can to help our neighbors in the wake of this devastating storm.”

So far, Cooper has deployed more than 700 members of North Carolina’s National Guard as part of search and rescue efforts and to deliver pallets of water and food supplies to those affected by widespread flooding and mudslides across the western half of the state, according to WRAL. President Joe Biden has approved Cooper’s request for expedited federal support.

Earlier this week, Donald Trump claimed that the federal government and Cooper were intentionally neglecting residents in Republican areas of North Carolina.

* This article originally misstated the day the WRAL report was published.

Republican Representative Mike Collins tried to support JD Vance by posting a picture of the vice presidential nominee on X Wednesday morning. It backfired.

Collins inexplicably posted a very clearly edited image of Vance’s face, slimmed down with enhanced features like a chin implant. The post immediately drew mockery, with social media commentators coming up with their own photoshopped pictures.

Other commentators pointed out how this is another example of the Republicans coming off as weird.

Collins’s post reminded some X users about the GOP culture-war stance of opposing gender-affirming care, with the post exposing conservative hypocrisy over medical procedures to change one’s appearance.

The roots of the photo seem to come from a years-old meme of “yassifying” photos to improve a person’s physical appearance, as well as the online far-right obsession over a standard of male physical appearance, specifically the “Chad” archetype that has become prevalent in right-wing memes. Was this image a nod to that far-right online base and its infamous 2016 efforts, or was it just a misguided attempt to boost JD Vance? Either way, much of the internet was left scratching their heads.

American voters had one unanimous takeaway from the vice presidential debate Tuesday night, and it veered directly into territory that the Republican ticket has spent months trying to avoid.

Google Trends data indicates that, despite the country’s divided attention on various key political issues, all 50 states were laser focused on just one topic after the 90-minute matchup between Ohio Senator JD Vance and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz: abortion.

Vance, who has previously likened abortion to murder, spent some of his time outright flaunting his support for a national abortion ban for cameras, attempting to frame himself as a flexible moderate on the issue rather than a politician who in 2023 described the procedure’s near-total restriction as a “minimum national standard.” Language on Vance’s website from his 2022 Senate race also described him as “100 percent pro-life.”

“I never supported a national ban,” Vance claimed during the debate. “I did, during when I was running for Senate in 2022, talk about setting some minimum national standard. For example, we have a partial-birth abortion ban … in place in this country at the federal level. I don’t think anybody is trying to get rid of that, or at least, I hope not, though I know the Democrats have taken a very radical pro-abortion stance.”

Vance also made an appeal to the hearts of Americans, invoking the image of a friend who he said required an abortion to escape an abusive relationship. But he failed to mention that the legislation he supported would have forced her to remain in the situation.

That discrepancy was enough to catch the attention of the country, who merged their disparate interests into a unanimous search engine query that swept the nation.

That data flies in the face of a major Republican claim: that people don’t actually care about abortion and are more interested in other issues.

The Republican ticket has attempted to soften its anti-choice position in the weeks building up to the election in an attempt to appeal to women’s rights activists and draw more voters to Donald Trump’s campaign. But the practical effects of Trump’s last administration are still obvious, not least of all instilling a hyperconservative Supreme Court that overturned Roe v. Wade, which Trump has proudly taken credit for. In 2023, the former president also claimed that he should be celebrated for every single state abortion ban.

Project 2025, the far-right, Christian nationalist blueprint for a potential second Trump administration, is also all in on banning the procedure, going so far as to propose criminalizing the mailing of abortion medications and devices.