Saturday, April 29, 2023

Also investigating Trump for wire fraud

Led by the special counsel Jack Smith, prosecutors are trying to determine whether Mr. Trump and his aides violated federal wire fraud statutes as they raised as much as $250 million through a political action committee by saying they needed the money to fight to reverse election fraud even though they had been told repeatedly that there was no evidence to back up those fraud claims.

The prosecutors are looking at the inner workings of the committee, Save America PAC, and at the Trump campaign’s efforts to prove its baseless case that Mr. Trump had been cheated out of victory.

[...]

An initial round of subpoenas, which started going out before Mr. Trump declared his candidacy in the 2024 race and Mr. Smith was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November, focused on various Republican officials and vendors that had received payments from Save America.

But more recently, investigators have homed in on the activities of a joint fund-raising committee made up of staff members from the 2020 Trump campaign and the Republican National Committee, among others. Some of the subpoenas have sought documents from around Election Day 2020 up the present.

Prosecutors have been heavily focused on details of the campaign’s finances, spending and fund-raising, such as who was approving email solicitations that were blasted out to lists of possible small donors and what they knew about the truth of the fraud claims, according to the people familiar with their work. All three areas overlap, and could inform prosecutors’ thinking about whether to proceed with charges in an investigation in which witnesses are still being interviewed.

  NYT
They all knew what they were doing. Trump is the world's biggest grifter.
Mr. Trump’s team may argue that the fund-raising represented political speech with solicitations that were generally vague, and that subjecting it to a criminal process could raise First Amendment issues and create a slippery slope for future candidates. Political fund-raising materials often engage in bombast or exaggeration.

[...]

Prosecutors have also been examining the plan to assemble alternate slates of pro-Trump electors from swing states won by Joseph R. Biden Jr., and the broader push by Mr. Trump to block or delay congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s Electoral College victory on Jan. 6, 2021, leading to the storming of the Capitol by Trump supporters.
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.

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