Smith: Trump Intelligence Officials Unanimously Rejected His Election Claims
In a new documents filed Saturday night,Politico reports Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith's team argues "intelligence officials unanimously rejected the idea that foreign governments penetrated any systems that counted votes or could have altered the election tally itself" — which undermines ex-President Donald Trump's claim.
Per the report, "The filing was part of the special counsel's opposition to a bid by Trump to access a broad swath of classified intelligence as part of his defense against charges that he conspired to subvert the 2020 election and disenfranchise millions of voters, culminating in the violent Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. Trump has argued that foreign governments fueled his supporters’ concerns about election integrity and that some classified evidence revealed potential meddling that justified his own professed fears about fraud."
Senior assistant special counsel Thomas Windom writes in the filing, Trump "tries to create a 'false impression' and 'manufacture confusion' by citing these 'irrelevant network breaches' and conflating them with potential changes to the vote total."
Alleging this "new legal effort" by Trump "is just an extension of his election lies," prosecutors say "intel officials documented some breaches of state voter registration databases that permitted various influence campaigns but were not capable of causing the vote-stealing scheme of which Trump has long sought to convince his followers."
Smith's team interviewed "more than a dozen of the top intelligence officials in Trump's administration — from his director of national intelligence to the administrator of the NSA to Trump's personal intelligence briefer — about any evidence that foreign governments had penetrated systems that counted votes in 2020."
Windom writes in the filing, "The answer from every single official was no."
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
