In Jack Smith’s statement announcing the Trump indictment yesterday, he emphasized how Trump’s lies “fueled” the attack on the Capitol.
The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government, the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.
The men and women of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol on January 6 are heroes. They’re patriots, and they are the very best of us. They did not just defend a building or the people sheltering in it. They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people. They defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.
For each sub-section in the section of the indictment that lays out Trump’s pressure on states, the indictment shows how Trump repeated false claims on January 6 that he had been told were false. While the indictment doesn’t cite the actual language that would appear in Trump’s Ellipse speech, it invokes these five lies (it doesn’t include the lies he told about Nevada):
In the state of Arizona, over 36,000 ballots were illegally cast by non-citizens. Two thousand ballots were returned with no address. [cited here]
[snip]
Over 10,300 ballots in Georgia were cast by individuals whose names and dates of birth match Georgia residents who died in 2020 and prior to the election. [cited here]
[snip]
That’s Detroit. One hundred and seventy-four thousand ballots were counted without being tied to an actual registered voter. Nobody knows where they came from. [cited here]
[snip]
There were over 205,000 more ballots counted in Pennsylvania. Think of this, you had 205,000 more ballots than you had voters. That means you had two. Where did they come from? You know where they came from? Somebody’s imagination, whatever they needed. [cited here; also cited in January 4 meeting with Pence]
[snip]
In Wisconsin, corrupt Democrat-run cities deployed more than 500 illegal, unmanned, unsecured drop boxes, which collected a minimum of 91,000 unlawful votes. [cited here]
With each of these lies, the indictment shows when he was told these claims were false (Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin). In several cases, the indictment also shows DOJ officials telling Trump those lies were false (Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin).
The actual citations from Trump’s Ellipse speech, which appears in the section on his pressuring of Mike Pence, focus on that — his false claims about what Pence could do (and the indictment describes Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman’s speeches as further effort to pressure Pence).
But before that, the indictment tracks the lies in the speech that Trump used to mobilize the mob.