When the defendant lost the 2020 presidential election, he resorted to crimes to try to stay in office. 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 “targeted states”). His efforts included lying to state officials in order to induce them to ignore true vote counts; manufacturing fraudulent electoral votes in the targeted states; attempting to enlist Vice President Michael R. Pence, in his role as President of the Senate, to obstruct Congress’s certification of the election by using the defendant’s fraudulent electoral votes; and when all else had failed, on January 6, 2021, directing an angry crowd of supporters to the United States Capitol to obstruct the congressional certification. The throughline of these efforts was deceit: the defendant’s and co-conspirators’ knowingly false claims of election fraud. They used these lies in furtherance of three conspiracies: 1) a conspiracy to interfere with the federal government function by which the nation collects and counts election results, which is set forth in the Constitution and the Electoral Count Act (ECA); 2) a conspiracy to obstruct the official proceeding in which Congress certifies the legitimate results of the presidential election; and 3) a conspiracy against the rights of millions of Americans to vote and have their votes counted.

At its core, the defendant’s scheme was a private criminal effort. In his capacity as a candidate, the defendant used deceit to target every stage of the electoral process, which through the Constitution, ECA, and state laws includes the states notification to the federal government of the selection of their representative electors based on the popular vote in the state; the meeting of those electors to cast their votes consistent with the popular vote; and Congress’s counting of the electors’ votes at a certification proceeding. As set forth in detail below, the defendant worked with private co-conspirators, including private attorneys RUDYGIULIANI, JOHNEASTMAN, SYDNEYPOWELL , and KENCHEESBORO  and private political operatives BORISEPSHTEYN  and STEVEBANNON. The defendant also relied heavily on private agents, such as his Campaign employees and volunteers, like Campaign Manager BILLSTEPIEN, Deputy Campaign Manger JUSTINCLARK, Senior Campaign Advisor JASONMILLER and Campaign operative MIKEROMAN.

In this section, the Government sets forth detailed facts supporting the charges against the defendant,[i] before addressing in the next section why none of this conduct is subject to immunity under the Supreme Court’s decision in Trump. The conduct set forth below includes the defendant’s formation of the conspiracies leading up to and immediately following the 2020 presidential election; certain information regarding his knowledge that there had not been outcome-determinative fraud in the election as he persistently claimed; and his increasingly desperate efforts to use knowingly false claims of election fraud to disrupt the electoral process. The Government does not consider any of the following conduct to be subject to immunity for the reasons set forth in Section III.

[i] Section I represents the Government’s efforts to provide the Court and the defendant with all of the categories of evidence that it may offer in its case-in-chief at trial. It does not include citations to every potential exhibit, nor does it account for any additional evidence that may be developed before trial.