New filing illuminates Nevada’s role in Trump’s 2020 election scheme

Special counsel Jack Smith’s new evidence in the election case against former President Donald Trump, released this week by a U.S. District Court judge, includes a trove of accounts involving how Trump tried to claim victory in Nevada in 2020, even though the official count showed him losing by about 30,000 votes.

Moments before hundreds of loyalists of the then-president stormed the U.S. Capitol attempting to disrupt the certification of President Joe Biden’s general election win, Trump continued peddling lies about the accuracy of the results in contested states, including Nevada.

“In Clark County, Nev., the accuracy settings on signature verification machines were purposefully lowered before they were used to count over 130,000 ballots,” Trump said in his speech Jan. 6, 2021, near the White House, according to unsealed court documents released Wednesday with the most comprehensive view to date on Trump’s failed efforts to remain in office.

He continued, “If you signed your name as Santa Claus, it would go through.”

Federal prosecutors said this week that Trump promoted bogus claims of voter fraud even before being declared the loser in the 2020 election, with plans of reversing the results and remaining in power. The newly unsealed court filings show fresh details from the criminal case against Trump, who is again making a run for the White House against Vice President Kamala Harris.

Smith’s team bluntly said Trump “resorted to crimes to try to stay in office.”

The report details an “increasingly desperate” president losing his grip on power and using “deceit to target every stage of the electoral process.”

The 165-page document lays out the evidence prosecutors assembled against Trump, adding more details to existing claims that he tried to remain in power through creating fraudulent electoral votes, lying to state officials, attempting to force then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop Congress’ certification of Biden as the Electoral College winner and “directing an angry crowd of supporters” to the Capitol when “all else had failed.”

The U.S. Supreme Court this past summer ruled that Trump and all former presidents ­are immune from prosecution for actions related to the “core powers” of the presidency. Smith’s filing, though, argues that evidence shows Trump’s actions were those of a losing candidate clawing to stay in power rather than the official acts of a president.

“The defendant asserts that he is immune from prosecution for his criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election because, he claims, it entailed official conduct,” Smith’s brief said. “Not so. Although the defendant was the incumbent president during the charged conspiracies, his scheme was fundamentally a private one.”

While Smith’s investigation of Trump has been ongoing since November 2022 and a federal grand jury indicted Trump in August 2023, the newly unsealed filing brought new information to light, like Trump’s response to concerns about Pence’s safety Jan. 6, 2021. Pence, who publicly stated he would support the certification of Biden’s Electoral College victory, had to be taken to a secure location during the Capitol riots.

The document claimed that when a staffer told Trump that Pence’s life was in peril during the rioting, the former president responded with a glance and said, “So what?”

In the brief, Nevada is listed as one of seven “targeted states” to flip the election results.

“With private co-conspirators, the defendant launched a series of increasingly desperate plans to overturn the legitimate election results in seven states that he had lost — Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin,” the filing said.

Trump on Jan. 6 also claimed Biden’s win in Nevada was aided by more than 42,000 people who voted twice, “more than 8,000 votes cast by individuals who had no address and probably didn’t live there,” and 1,500 ballots cast by those who died before Election Day.

“The margin in Nevada is down at a very low number. Any of these things would have taken care of the situation,” Trump said. “We would have won Nevada also. Every one of these we’re going over, we win.”

It’s not the first time Trump had questioned the validity of Clark County’s voting process. In 2022, he made allegations on the social media platform Truth Social saying, “Clark County, Nevada, has a corrupt voting system.”

The county responded by posting on Twitter that “all our election systems are certified by the state and federal governments for use in the State of Nevada. And there are several state required audits done before, during, and after each election, which further ensure the reliability and integrity of the election.”

Prosecutors also argue Trump used his Twitter account to spread false claims of election fraud, attacking “those speaking the truth” about his loss and exhorting his supporters to travel to Washington for the Jan. 6, 2021, certification.

Smith’s team intends to use “forensic evidence” from Trump’s iPhone to provide insight into Trump’s actions after the Capitol attack.

Of the more than 1,200 posts Trump sent on Twitter during the weeks detailed in the indictment, prosecutors say, the vast majority were about the 2020 election, including those falsely claiming Pence could reject electors even though the vice president had told Trump that he had no such power.

That “steady stream of disinformation” culminated in his speech Jan. 6, 2021, where Trump “used these lies to inflame and motivate the large and angry crowd of his supporters to march to the Capitol and disrupt the certification proceeding,” prosecutors wrote.

Trump additionally attempted to reverse the result using a fake elector scheme in Nevada and five other contested states.

Led by Nevada Republican Party Chairman Michael McDonald, about a dozen Republicans met Dec. 14, 2020, in Carson City and conducted a fake ceremony to certify Nevada’s electoral votes for Trump.

The Nevada Republican Party sent the document — titled “Certificate of the Votes of the 2020 Electors from Nevada” — to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., with McDonald’s name listed with the return address.

Republicans in a handful of states went through a similar process — all with the same misleading and potentially criminal logic.

The meeting of fake electors, here and in the other five contested states, had no legal standing.

Nevada’s real electors had already certified the state’s election that same day in a remote ceremony, awarding all six of Nevada’s electoral votes to Biden.

The six Nevada Republicans were later indicted, but the charges against them were dismissed in June by a district judge who ruled that the case couldn’t have been brought in Clark County since the events took place in Northern Nevada.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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