It's not necessary to show that Trump knew that he lost for him to be convicted of some of his charges as several sources below make clear. That said, there is strong evidence that Donald Trump did KNOW that he lost. First this diary will support the thesis that it is not necessary to prove that Trump knew that he lost in order to convict Trump of some of the charges in one or more of the indictments by quoting reliable sources. Second, this diary will provide strong evidence that Trump did KNOW that he lost.
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“There's no need to prove that Trump knew he lost the election to establish corrupt intent,” said Norman Eisen, special counsel to the House judiciary committee in the first Trump impeachment.Aug 7, 2023
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Jessica Levinson explains it to us
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No, Jack Smith doesn’t have to prove Trump knew he lost
Strange as it may seem, why Trump allegedly committed these crimes is beside the point.
All four charges laid out in the second federal indictment of former President Donald Trump center around the idea that Trump tried to steal the 2020 election. Hence, some people incorrectly believe that part of the prosecution’s job will be showing that Trump understood that he was the one trying to steal the election, and not that it was stolen from him. Those people are mistaken. Special counsel Jack Smith can convict Trump on all charges — corruptly obstructing and conspiring to corrupt an official proceeding, conspiring to defraud the government, and conspiring to violate civil rights — without ever showing that Trump knew he had lost the 2020 election.
Yes, Smith did spill a good deal of ink including allegations that, if proven, would demonstrate that Trump was well aware that Biden had defeated him, and that his statements to the contrary were knowing lies. But those allegations merely help Smith tell us, and eventually a jury, a consistent story. They fill in the narrative contours of the facts alleged in the indictment. They aren’t necessary for his success.
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NY TIMES: Special Prosecutor Jack Smith structured the Trump election indictment to reduce risks
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How Jack Smith Structured the Trump Election Indictment to Reduce Risks
The special counsel layered varied charges atop the same facts, while sidestepping a free-speech question by not charging incitement.
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NY TIMES agrees that it is not necessary to prove Trump lied
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“Whether he thinks he won or lost is relevant but not determinative,” said Paul Rosenzweig, a former prosecutor who worked on the independent counsel investigation into President Bill Clinton. “Trump could try to achieve vindicating his beliefs legally. The conspiracy is tied to the illegal means. So he has to say that he thought ‘finding’ 11,000 votes was legal, or that fake electors were legal. That is much harder to say with a straight face.”
Court rulings interpreting the statute that criminalizes defrauding the United States, for example, have established that evidence of deception or dishonesty is sufficient. In a 1924 Supreme Court ruling, Chief Justice William H. Taft wrote that it covers interference with a government function “by deceit, craft or trickery, or at least by means that are dishonest.”
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“The indictment alleges that, rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s election result,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said late on Monday, noting that each of those named in the indictment are innocent until proven guilty.
To convict Trump, Georgia prosecutors would have to prove the existence of a racketeering “enterprise” and a pattern of racketeering based on at least two “qualifying” crimes. Racketeering is a form of organized criminal activity that involves operating illegal schemes (such as extortion or trying to overturn an election), often in a systematic and coordinated manner, by using intimidation, coercion, and manipulation. It’s a serious charge of which members of groups ranging from the Mafia to FIFA have been convicted.
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Thus, it seems clear that it is not necessary to prove that Trump knew that he lost in order to convict him of some of the charges from one or more of the indictments. However, there are several lines of evidence showing that Trump knew that he lost: (1) from his own people, (2) from republicans in state government, (3) from court cases , (4) from evidence showing Trump clearly lied, and (5) from hearsay evidence (inadmissible unfortunately) from Cassidy Hutchinson.
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Cassidy Hutchinson testified that she heard Trump admit that he lost
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Cassidy Hutchinson: Trump told Meadows ‘this is embarrassing,’‘I don’t want people to know that we lost’
Former President Trump told his then-chief of staff “this is embarrassing,” and “I don’t want people to know that we lost,” after the Supreme Court ruled against him on a key case about the 2020 election, former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riot.
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Trump admitted that he lost to top aides
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Trump privately admitted he lost 2020 election, top aides testify
Alyssa Farah and Cassidy Hutchinson tell January 6 panel former president acknowledged he had been defeated by Joe Biden.
Donald Trump privately admitted to losing the 2020 election even as he worked to undermine and change the results, according to two top aides who testified before the January 6 committee.
During the ninth and possibly final hearing, the committee investigating the January 6 insurrection shared new testimony from Alyssa Farah, a former White House aide, who said that a week after the election was called in favor of Biden, Trump was watching Biden on the television in the Oval Office, and said: “‘Can you believe I lost to this effing guy?’”
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Donald Trump was told by his own people that he lost. He was told that he lost by his campaign manager, by his attorney general, Bill Barr, by his acting attorney general, Jeffrey Rosen, by his acting deputy attorney general, Richard Donaghue, and by his cyber security expert, Chris Krebs, in DHS.
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Bill Barr
Barr told the committee that, following the November election, he had three discussions with Trump about the results.
“I made it clear I did not agree with the idea of saying the election was stolen and putting out this stuff which I told the president was bullshit. I didn’t want to be a part of it and that’s one of the reasons I decided to leave when I did,” Barr said. “I observed, I think on Dec. 1, you can’t live in a world where the incumbent administration stays in power based on its view unsupported by specific evidence that there was fraud in the election.”
“I [Acting Deputy Attorney General Richard Donaghue] tried to, again, put this in perspective and try to put it in very clear terms to the president. I said something to the effect of, ‘Sir, we’ve done dozens of investigations, hundreds of interviews. The major allegations are not supported by the evidence developed. We’ve looked in Georgia, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Nevada,’” Donoghue said in a recorded interview shared by the committee. “‘We’re doing our job. Much of the info you’re getting is false.’”
I [Kellyanne Conway] may have been the first person Donald Trump trusted in his inner circle who told him that he had come up short this time,” Conway wrote.
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Lead data expert Matt Oczkowski also told Trump that he was going to lose as did Trump campaign lawyer Alex Cannon.
Former Trump campaign manager Bill Steppien told Trump not to declare victory, that his odds of winning were very bleak, maybe five to ten percent based upon realistic recounts and challenges.
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Trump Fires Election Security Director Who Corrected Voter Fraud Disinformation
Krebs' firing came after his agency, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, last week released a statement calling the 2020 election "the most secure in American history."
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These were people he thought were so reliable, trustworthy, and competent that he either hired or nominated them. He clearly thought that they were more reliable, trustworthy, and competent than the team crazy people or he would have hired and/or nominated the team crazy people for those positions. Therefore, it is undeniable that the only reason he later backed these people was because they said what he wanted to be said. Hence, this isn't Donald Trump finding these people and being really impressed with their background and credentials and then hearing from them that the election was stolen. Rather, this is Trump wanting somebody, anybody, to declare that he actually won and that the election was stolen, no matter how poorly prepared and no matter how inadequate their background, and these people did that and, therefore, were backed. It's like Trump threw some darts or shot some arrows on a barn door and then drew circles around where the darts or arrows landed to show what great aim he had. When so many members of his own people told him that he lost, he knew that was the case.
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Republicans who told Trump that he lost
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.Per the indictment, Shirkey and Chatfield met with Trump in the Oval Office on Nov. 20, 2020, and heard Trump’s false claims about illegitimate voting in Detroit. They said afterward in a joint statement that they had “not yet been made aware of any information that would change the outcome” in the state.
.Bowers told them investigations had uncovered no evidence of significant fraud in the state.
Trump urged Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to reverse his defeat in the state in an hour-long phone call on Jan. 2, 2021. Raffensperger debunked a number of his false claims, including allegations that thousands of dead people had voted.
“Well, Mr. President,” he said, “the challenge that you have is the data you have is wrong."
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In a searing news conference on Monday, Gabriel Sterling, a top election official in Georgia, systematically debunked President Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Again.
“The reason I’m having to stand here today is because there are people in positions of authority and respect who have said their votes didn’t count, and it’s not true,” said Mr. Sterling, a Republican who last month condemned the president’s failure to denounce threats against election officials, and who was tasked on Monday with responding to the news of a phone call in which Mr. Trump pressured Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to change the outcome of the presidential race.
“It’s anti-disinformation Monday,” Mr. Sterling said. “It’s whack-a-mole again, it’s Groundhog Day again, and I’m going to talk about things that I’ve talked about repeatedly for two months. I’m going to do it again one last time. I hope.”
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Arizona Senate President Karen Fann, the Republican who paved the way for the so-called "full forensic audit" of 2.1 million ballots in Maricopa County, said the review's overall vote tally matched the initial results in November.
Truth is truth, numbers are numbers," Fann said at a Senate hearing on the review, which found only small variations, yielding 99 additional votes for Biden and 261 fewer votes for Trump. "Those numbers were close, within a few hundred."
The conclusion will dismay Trump supporters who had pushed for the review, many in the expectation that it would prove his unfounded assertions that he was robbed of re-election due to orchestrated fraud. So far no such proof has been produced either by Trump or his backers.
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Donald Trump and his allies filed 62 lawsuits challenging the election results. He lost 61 of the 62. There is no way that he didn't know that he and his allies lost these lawsuits. The only lawsuit he won was one which disallowed several thousand people to cure their ballots, but this was in a state, Pennsylvania, that they lost by nearly 70,000 votes. Thus, this one lawsuit didn't come close to altering who won the state of Pennsylvania.
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Here is the only lawsuit that Trump's legal team won
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Donald J. Trump for President, Inc. et al v. Boockvar et al
Filed: Nov. 4
Claim: The Trump campaign and others challenged guidance that Ms. Boockvar provided to counties before the election, allowing them to tell absentee voters they had until Nov. 12 to provide missing proof of identification.
Context: Pennsylvania law normally sets a deadline for six days after the election, Nov. 9 this year, for providing missing voter ID. Ms. Boockvar, the secretary of state, extended the deadline to Nov. 12 in light of a decision by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court to allow absentee ballots to be counted if they were received by Nov. 6. The extension Ms. Boockvar allowed applied to only a small number of ballots with missing ID that arrived after Nov. 3.
Status: Judge Mary Hannah Leavitt of the Commonwealth Court ordered this narrow category of ballots to be excluded from the state count. None of these ballots had yet been included. This the Trump campaign’s only win so far in post election litigation.
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Hence, this one lawsuit that Trump's legal team managed to win did not come close to altering who won Pennsylvania.
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Trump’s own lawyers keep undermining his voter fraud claims
Analysis by AaronPresident Trump’s legal challenges are still floundering, as lawyers are forced to wage a battle based on specious and baseless claims in an effort to hold up the certification of the 2020 election.
But what’s often just as notable as the failure of the efforts is in how little they resemble Trump’s actual allegations.
In fact, despite Trump’s claims of massive fraud and other nefarious occurrences, his lawyers have repeatedly acknowledged that there is no evidence of such things or said they weren’t making the same allegations Trump is.
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Here is one example of the difference between what Trump and his allies say outside of court and what Trump's legal team claimed in court.
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Massive fraudWhat Trump says: “I WON THE ELECTION. VOTER FRAUD ALL OVER THE COUNTRY!” (Nov. 18)
“… There were massive improprieties and fraud …” (Nov. 17)
What his lawyers say: Appearing in a Pennsylvania courtroom Tuesday in the state’s biggest case, Trump lawyer Rudolph W. Giuliani conceded, “This is not a fraud case.”
In the same case, a judge asked Trump lawyer Linda Kerns whether she would “agree with me that you are not proceeding based on allegations of fraud or misconduct; is that correct?” Kerns responded, “I am not proceeding on those allegations."
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President Biden won Pennsylvania by more than 70,000 votes
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NY TIMES GIVES SOME EVIDENCE OF CLEAR LIES TRUMP TOLD
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The indictment, for example, recounts a taped call on Jan. 2 with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, in which Mr. Trump shared a series of conspiracy theories that Mr. Raffensperger systematically debunked in detail. But on Twitter the next day, Mr. Trump “falsely claimed that the Georgia secretary of state had not addressed” the allegations.
And on Jan. 5, Mr. Pence told Mr. Trump that he had no lawful authority to alter or delay the counting of Mr. Biden’s electoral votes, but “hours later” Mr. Trump issued a statement through his campaign saying the opposite: “The vice president and I are in total agreement that the vice president has the power to act.”
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What are the 3 elements of standing to sue?Standing includes the following three (3) elements: (1) Injury in Fact; (2) Causation; and (3) Redressability. If a claimant can establish these three elements in its cause of action, the claimant generally will have the right to bring that cause of action against the other party.Sep 29, 2022https://www.fvflawfirm.com › blog
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In law, standing or locus standi is a condition that a party seeking a legal remedy must show they have, by demonstrating to the court, sufficient connection to and harm from the law or action challenged to support that party's participation in the case.
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A summary of Trump's losses in court
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There were over 60 lawsuits. There were 86 judges involved. Thirty-eight of the judges involved were Republican appointees. Eight of the judges were Trump appointees. All of these judges ruled against Trump and his specious claims of a stolen election. None of Trump's three appointees to the Supreme Court spoke out on his behalf.
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We have established that neither District Attorney Fani Willis nor Special Prosecutor Jack Smith are required to prove Trump knew that he lost in order to get a conviction on at least one of the charges in at least one of his indictments. However, there are several lines of evidence proving that Trump knew that he lost: (1) hearsay evidence inadmissible as it is makes this clear (2) Trump's own people whom he nominated or hired TD him that he lost (3) Trump was told that he lost by republicans in state government (4) Trump knew that he lost because he had to know that he lost 61/62 cases.
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