Federal prosecutors said Tuesday they intend to present evidence at Donald Trump’s upcoming election-subversion trial that an agent of the former president sought “to cause a riot to disrupt the count” of votes in Detroit after the 2020 presidential election.
In a court filing Tuesday, Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office said the agent of Trump is an unindicted co-conspriator in the case, and identified him or her only as “Campaign Employee.”
It is unclear whether or not the Trump 2020 campaign employee is among the six unindicted co-conspirators discussed in Trump’s Aug. 1 indictment or if it’s someone new altogether.
“On November 4, 2020, the Campaign Employee exchanged a series of text messages with an attorney supporting the Campaign’s election day operations at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were being counted,” Smith’s office wrote. “[I]n the messages, the Campaign Employee encouraged rioting and other methods of obstruction when he learned that the vote count was trending in favor of the defendant’s opponent.”
Around the time that those text messages were exchanged, prosecutors wrote, “an election official at the TCF Center observed that as [President Joe] Biden began to take the lead, a large number of untrained individuals flooded the TCF Center and began making illegitimate and aggressive challenges to the vote count.”
“Thereafter, Trump made repeated false claims regarding election activities at the TCF Center, when in truth his agent was seeking to cause a riot to disrupt the count,” the prosecutors added.