Trump signed legal docs knowing election fraud claims were false, judge says
Global News
The comments came in a ruling ordering the release of emails from Trump legal advisor John Eastman to the Jan. 6 committee because they contain evidence of potential crimes.
Former U.S. President Donald Trump signed legal documents challenging the results of the 2020 election that included voter fraud claims he knew to be false, a federal judge said in a ruling Wednesday.
U.S. District Court Judge David Carter in an 18-page opinion ordered that four emails between Trump and attorney John Eastman be given to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He said the emails cannot be withheld because they include evidence of potential crimes.
Though the judge’s conclusion has no practical bearing on a separate Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the election, any evidence that Trump signed documents he knew to be false could at minimum be a notable data point for criminal prosecutors trying to sort out culpability for far-ranging efforts to undo the results.
The judge specifically cited claims from Trump’s attorneys that Fulton County in Georgia had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes of dead people, felons and unregistered voters. Those false allegations were part of a filing that Trump’s legal team made in Georgia state court on Dec. 4, 2021.
Later that month, Eastman warned in a message that Trump had been made aware that “some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts)” in that Georgia filing “has been inaccurate.”
Yet even after the message from Eastman, Trump and his team filed another legal complaint that had “the same inaccurate numbers,” the judge wrote. Trump under oath verified the complaint was true to the best of his knowledge.
“The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public,” Carter wrote. He said the emails are “sufficiently related to and in furtherance of a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”
Representatives for Trump and Eastman did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
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