21 Trump election lies listed in his new indictment
The lie that fraud changed the outcome of the 2020 election, that Trump “had actually won,” and that the election was “stolen.” (Pages 1 and 40-41 of the indictment) Trump’s claim of a stolen election whose winner was determined by massive fraud was (and continues to be) his overarching lie about the election. 2. Trump and his alleged co-conspirators “organized” the phony slates of electors and then “caused” the slates to be transmitted to Vice President Mike Pence and other government officials to try to get them counted on January 6, the day Congress met to count the electoral votes. The lie that fake pro-Trump Electoral College electors in seven states were legitimate electors. (Pages 5 and 26) 3. Trump still sought to have the Justice Department “make knowingly false claims of election fraud to officials in the targeted states through a formal letter under the Acting Attorney General’s signature, thus giving the Defendant’s lies the backing of the federal government and attempting to improperly influence the targeted states to replace legitimate Biden electors with the Defendant’s.” The lie that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have affected the outcome of the election. (Pages 6 and 27) Attorney General William Barr and other top Justice Department officials had told Trump that his claims of major fraud had proved to be untrue. 4. Trump nonetheless repeatedly declared that Pence could reject Biden’s electoral votes – first in private conversations and White House meetings, then in tweets on January 5 and January 6, then in Trump’s January 6 speech in Washington at a rally before the riot – in which Trump, angry at Pence, allegedly inserted the false claim into his prepared text even after advisors had managed to temporarily get it removed. The lie that Pence had the power to reject Biden’s electoral votes. (Pages 6, 32-38) Pence had repeatedly and correctly told Trump that he did not have the constitutional or legal right to send electoral votes back to the states as Trump wanted. 5. The day before the riot, Trump “approved and caused” his campaign to issue a false statement saying Pence agreed with him about having the power to reject electoral votes – even though Trump knew, from a one-on-one meeting with Pence hours prior, that Pence continued to firmly disagree. The lie that “the Vice President and I are in total agreement that the Vice President has the power to act.” (Page 36) 6. Georgia’s top elections official – Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – a republican – explained to Trump in a phone call on January 2, 2021 that his claim that "thousands of ballots were cast in the names of dead people" was false, but that Trump repeated it in his January 6 rally speech anyway. Raffensperger said in the phone call and then in a January 6 to Congress that just two potential dead-voter cases had been discovered in the state; Raffensperger said in late 2021 that the total had been updated and stood at four. The lie that Georgia had thousands of ballots cast in the names of dead people. (Pages 8 and 16) 7. Trump’s acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Richard Donoghue had both told him that this claim was false , but he kept making it anyway – including in the January 6 rally speech. The lie that Pennsylvania had 205,000 more votes than voters. (Pages 8 and 20) 8. Barr, the attorney general, told Trump on December 1, 2020 that this was false – as CNN and others had noted, supposedly nefarious “dumps” Trump kept talking about were merely ballots being counted and added to the public totals as normal – but that Trump still repeated the false claim in public remarks the next day. And Barr wasn’t the only one to try to dissuade Trump from this claim. The indictment also notes that Michigan’s Republican Senate majority leader, Mike Shirkey, had told Trump in an Oval Office meeting on November 20, 2020 that Trump had lost the state “not because of fraud” but because Trump had “underperformed with certain voter populations.” The lie that there had been a suspicious “dump” of votes in Detroit, Michigan. (Pages 9 and 17) 9. Nevada’s top elections official – Secretary of State Barbara Cegavske, also a Republican – had publicly posted a “Facts vs. Myths” document explaining that Nevada judges had rejected such claims. The lie that Nevada had tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud. (Page 9) 10. Trump put the number at “over 36,000” in his January 6 speech – even though, the indictment says, his own campaign manager “had explained to him that such claims were false ” and Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, a Republican, who had supported Trump in the election, “had issued a public statement that there was no evidence of substantial fraud in Arizona.” The lie that more than 30,000 non-citizens had voted in Arizona. (Pages 9 and 11) 11.
The false conspiracy theories about
Dominion Voting Systems machines, which Trump kept long after it was thoroughly debunked by his own administration’s election cybersecurity security arm and many others. The lie that voting machines in swing states had switched votes from Trump to Biden. (Page 9) 12. Trump, on Twitter, promoted a lawsuit filed by an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as lawyer Sidney Powell, that alleged “massive election fraud” involving Dominion – even though, Trump privately acknowledged to advisors that the claims were “unsupported” and told them Powell sounded “crazy". The lie that Dominion machines had been involved in “massive election fraud.” (Page 12) 13. The indictment alleges that Trump and an alleged co-conspirator, whom CNN has identified as former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, made these baseless claims on a November 22, 2020 phone call with Bowers; the indictment says Giuliani never provided evidence and eventually said, at a December 1, 2020 meeting with Bowers, “words to the effect of, ‘We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories.” The lie that “a substantial number of non-citizens, non-residents, and dead people had voted fraudulently in Arizona.” (Page 10) 14. This is the long-debunked lie – which Trump has continued to repeat in 2023 – that a video had caught two elections workers in Atlanta breaking the law. The workers were simply doing their jobs, and, as the indictment notes, they were cleared of wrongdoing by state officials in 2020 – but Trump continued to make the claims even after Raffensperger and Justice Department officials directly and repeatedly told him they were unfounded. The lie that Fulton County, Georgia elections workers had engaged in “ballot stuffing.” (Pages 13 and 14) 15. Trump made this claim on his infamous January 2, 2021 call with Raffensperger, whose staff responded that the claim was inaccurate. An official in Raffensberger’s office explained to Trump that the voters in question had authentically moved back to Georgia and legitimately cast ballots. The lie that thousands of out-of-state voters cast ballots in Georgia. (Page 16) 16. The day after the call, Raffensperger and his staff had addressed and debunked all of these false Trump claims. The lie that Raffensperger “was unwilling, or unable,” to address Trump’s claims about a “‘ballots under table’ scam, ballot destruction, out of state ‘voters’, dead voters, and more.” (Page 16) 17. False and false. Trump made the vague fraud claim in a on December 21, 2020, after the state Supreme Court upheld Biden’s win, and repeated the more specific claim about tens of thousands of unlawful votes in the January 6 speech, The lie that there was substantial fraud in Wisconsin and that the state had tens of thousands of unlawful votes. (Page 21) 18. This, like Trump’s similar claim about Pennsylvania, is not true. Trump raised the claim in a December 27, 2020 conversation with acting attorney general Rosen and acting deputy attorney general Donoghue, who informed him that it was false. The lie that Wisconsin had more votes counted than it had actual voters. (Page 21) 19.
When acting attorney general Rosen told Trump on the
December 27, 2020 call that the Justice Department couldn’t and wouldn’t change
the outcome of the election, The lie that the election was “corrupt.” (Page 28) 20. At a January 4, 2021
meeting intended to convince Pence to unlawfully reject Biden’s electoral votes
and send them back to swing-state legislatures, Pence took notes describing
Trump as saying, “Bottom line - won every state by 100,000s of votes.” The lie that Trump won every state by hundreds of thousands of votes. (Page 34) 21. Trump made this false claim in his January 6 speech. In reality, some Republican state legislators in Pennsylvania had expressed a desire to at least delay the congressional affirmation of Biden’s victory – but the state’s Democratic governor and top elections official, who actually had election certification power in the state, had no desire to recertify Biden’s already legitimate win. The lie that Pennsylvania “want[s] to recertify.” (Page 38) The formidable Republicans who corrected Trump’s election lies, but he ignored. |
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