Court Filing Shows Prosecutors Will Pin Capitol Riot Directly On Trump At Trial

A new court filing this week from special prosecutor Jack Smith's office shows that his team is preparing to pin the blame for the Capitol Riot squarely on Donald Trump during the main federal trial against him next year. The filing makes it clear that inciting the riot was Trump's way to intimidate members of Congress into voting to NOT certify the 2020 election results, or at the very least to delay the inevitable. This could open up a whole new area of liability for the former President, as Farron Cousins explains.

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*This transcript was auto-generated. Please excuse any typos.

Special prosecutor Jack Smith's office filed a new motion or filing, I guess you would call it in court this week, laying out how they want to approach Donald Trump in trial. And what they've said in this new filing is that they are essentially going to pin the blame for the January 6th Capitol riot, or the insurrection, whatever you wanna call it. They're gonna pin the blame of that on Donald Trump because as they argue in their filing, this was part of Donald Trump's efforts to obviously obstruct an official proceeding of Congress. Now, let me read you what they wrote in the filing. And this is very important, by the way. I get to that in just a moment. But here's what they said. Specifically, the defendant here is charged with four related criminal counts, including conspiring to obstruct and obstructing the official certification proceeding on January 6th. Essential to those charges are factual allegations and evidence that the proceeding was in fact impeded, namely by a large crowd, including individuals whom the defendant had directed at the Capitol that violently advanced on the Capitol building to create a catastrophic security risk.

They also argue that this was part of Donald Trump's effort to intimidate members of Congress to get them to vote against certifying the 2020 election results, which of course is part of the conspiracy charges against Donald Trump. Now, this is not an easy claim for the prosecutors to make in court. I, I agree with the tactic, but they have got to have all of their ducks in a row in order to be successful with this. Because since they're going this route, they're not only gonna have to prove all the charges against him, but in order to prove those charges, they now also have to prove that Donald Trump inspired the rally on purpose. Okay? Saying that Donald Trump inspired the rally, inspired the riot. Sorry. Um, we know that his words inspired the riot, but did he do it knowingly? Could Donald Trump have known that these people were going to march to the Capitol to storm the barricades, to, to go in there and start stealing and breaking stuff? That is a very difficult thing to prove, but not impossible because you don't just have to prove that he knew it would happen. Okay? There may be a way around that, and here's how that would work. Donald Trump may not have known that that crowd was going to storm the capitol,

But once they did storm the capitol, this is where things get interesting. This is where the prosecutors can prove their point. What did Donald Trump do to stop him? He was the president of the United States. He has the full force of the United States military at his disposal. So what did he do? He could have put out a statement earlier in the day telling these people, stop it, knock it off. Go home. I don't like this. This is wrong. You're bad people. But he waited until late afternoon. Those facts are the ones that they're gonna be able to use to prove that Donald Trump approved and accepted what was taking place at the Capitol so they can get around the fact that they're not gonna be able to prove that he knew they would storm the capitol by saying that once it happened, he didn't do anything to stop it because it was obstructing Congress from doing their job.

So suddenly it's not such a daunting task anymore. And I'll tell you what else happens here. In going this route, they're going to uncover more internal communications more than they already have, even though they already have a lot of 'em. That's gonna show Donald Trump sitting on his butt eating Cheetos, watching Fox News as people storm the capitol. All of this evidence that they produced to show that Donald Trump was complacent with what was happening, uh, borderline complicit, if you will, they'll be able to share that eventually with the civil trials against Donald Trump. Hell, if it's still going on, they may even be able to share that with these lawsuits trying to get Donald Trump kicked off the ballot using the 14th Amendment.