Jack Smith’s team has submitted a 404(b) notice — evidence that may not be intrinsic to the case but that describes Trump’s criminal propensity and helps prove his motive — in Trump’s DC case.
Along with providing examples where Trump continued to target someone (in this case Ruby Freeman) long after his prior targeting of her had resulted in threats and Trump’s celebration of insurrectionists like Enrique Tarrio, DOJ includes a heavily-redacted passage describing a Trump campaign employee’s attempt to cause a riot at the TCF Center, where election workers were counting the votes of Detroiters.
The Government also plans to introduce evidence of an effort undertaken by an agent (and unindicted co-conspirator) of the defendant who worked for his campaign (“the Campaign Employee”) to, immediately following the election, obstruct the vote count. On November 4, 2020, the Campaign Employee exchanged a series of text messages with an attorney supporting the Campaign’s election day operations at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were being counted; in the messages, the Campaign Employee encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of the defendant’s opponent.
[seven lines redacted]
The Government will also show that around the time of these messages, an election official at the TCF Center observed that as Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count. Thereafter, Trump made repeated false claims regarding election activities at the TCF Center, when in truth his agent was seeking to cause a riot to disrupt the count. This evidence is admissible to demonstrate that the defendant, his co-conspirators, and agents had knowledge that the defendant had lost the election, as well as their intent and motive to obstruct and overturn the legitimate results.
This is may be a reference to Mike Roman. Roman — Trump’s Director of Election Day Operations and a key ratfucker in other ways — posted a video falsely claiming that the challengers were being ejected improperly from the counting center.
According to the Election Integrity Project, Roman was also one of the most efficient spreaders of disinformation during the post-election period, wildly out of proportion to his number of Twitter followers (suggesting he had offline ways to help make things go viral).
Trump’s effort to make it harder to count the votes of Black voters has never gotten enough attention — not even though this specific tactic is a replay of Roger Stone’s Stop the Steal efforts in 2016, in some of the very same cities, as well as the Florida Brooks Brother’s riot. But it’s a key part of proving not just that Trump tried to throw out Joe Biden’s votes, but specifically the votes of Joe Biden’s Black supporters.