Following election day and throughout the charged conspiracies, the defendant, his co- conspirators, and their agents spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These lies included dozens of specific claims that there had been substantial fraud in certain states, such as that large numbers of dead, non-resident, non-citizen, or otherwise ineligible voters had cast ballots, or that voting machines had changed votes for the defendant to votes for Biden. And the defendant and co-conspirators continued to make these unsupported, objectively unreasonable, and ever-changing claims even after they had been publicly disproven or after advisors had directly informed the defendant that they were untrue.

The evidence demonstrates that the defendant knew his fraud claims were false because he continued to make those claims even after his close advisors-acting not in an official capacity but in a private or Campaign-related capacity told him they were not true. These advisors included ERICHERSHMANN the White House staffer and Campaign conduit, and Pence, the defendant’s running mate.

ERICHERSHMANN relationship with the defendant began before ERICHERSHMANN worked for him in the White House. ERICHERSHMANN had known JAREDKUSHNER the defendant’s son-in-law, since JAREDKUSHNER was a child, and through JAREDKUSHNER met IVANKATRUMP and then the defendant. ERICHERSHMANN was one of several attorneys who represented the defendant in his first impeachment trial in the Senate in 2019 and 2020, including presenting argument on the Senate floor on January 27, 2020. ERICHERSHMANN began working in the White House as an Assistant to the President in August 2020. In October 2020, ERICHERSHMANN became interested in learning more about the defendant’s Campaign, and in early November 2020, after he began interfacing with Campaign staff. ERICHERSHMANN consulted with the White House Counsel’s Office to ensure he complied with any applicable laws regarding Campaign activity. Thereafter, and throughout the post-election period, ERICHERSHMANN became a conduit of information from the Campaign to the defendant, and over the course of the conspiracies, ERICHERSHMANN told the defendant the unvarnished truth about his Campaign legal team and the claims of fraud that they and the defendant were making.

Examples of these instances include:

• ERICHERSHMANN repeatedly gave the defendant his honest assessment that GIULIANI could not mount successful legal challenges to the election. For instance, when the defendant told ERICHERSHMANN that he was going to put GIULIANI in charge of the Campaign’s legal efforts but pay him only if he succeeded, ERICHERSHMANN told the defendant he would never have to pay GIULIANI anything; in response, the defendant laughed and said, “we’ll see.” Thereafter, in Oval Office meetings with the defendant, GIULIANI and others, in which GIULIANI made speculative claims, ERICHERSHMANN told GIULIANI -in front of the defendant that GIULIANI would be unable to prove his allegations in a courtroom. In a separate private conversation, when ERICHERSHMANN reiterated to the defendant that GIULIANI would be unable to prove his false fraud allegations in court, the defendant responded, The details don’t matter.”
• In the post-election period, ERICHERSHMANN also took on the role of updating the defendant on a near-daily basis on the Campaign’s unsuccessful efforts to support any fraud claims. ERICHERSHMANN told the defendant that the Campaign was looking into his fraud claims, and had even hired external experts to do so, but could find no support for them. He told the defendant that if the Campaign took these claims to court, they would get slaughtered, because the claims are all bullshit.” ERICHERSHMANN was privy in real time to the findings of the two expert consulting firms the Campaign retained to investigate fraud claims- BERKLEYRES and SIMPATICOSYSTEMS -and discussed with the defendant their debunkings on all major claims. For example, ERICHERSHMANN told the defendant that Georgia’s audit disproved claims that DOMINIONVOTING had altered votes.

In the post-election time period, Pence the defendant’s own running mate, who he had directed to assess fraud allegations told the defendant that he had seen no evidence of outcome- determinative fraud in the election. This was in one of the many conversations the defendant and Pence had as running mates, in which they discussed their shared electoral interests. Pence gradually and gently tried to convince the defendant to accept the lawful results of the election, even if it meant they lost. These conversations included:

• A conversation on November 4 in which the defendant asked Pence to ‘study up” claims of voter fraud in states that they had won together in 2016 to determine whether they could bring legal challenges as candidates in those states. Pence described the conversation as follows: “Well, I think, I think it was broadly. It was just look at all of it. Let me know what you think. But he told me that the Campaign was going to fight, was going to go to court and make challenges.. . . And then he just said we’re going to fight this and take a look at it. Let me know what you think.
• A call between the defendant and Pence on November 7, the day that media organizations began to project Biden as the winner of the election. Pence “tried to encourage” the defendant as a friend, reminding him, “You took a dying political party and gave it a new lease on life.”
• A November 11 meeting among the defendant, Pence, campaign staff, and some White House staff during which Pence asked when most of the lawsuits would be resolved (“When does this come to a head?”) and the campaign staff responded, “The week after Thanksgiving.”
• A November 12 meeting among the defendant, Pence, Campaign staff, and some White House staff during which, Pence recalls, the “Camnpaign lawyers gave a sober and somewhat pessimistic report on the state of election challenges.”
• A private lunch on November 12 in which Pence reiterated a face-saving option for the defendant: “don’t concede but recognize process is over.”
• A private lunch on November 16 in which Pence tried to encourage the defendant to accept the results of the election and run again in 2024, to which the defendant responded, “I don’t know, 2024 is so far off.”
• A November 23 phone call in which the defendant told Pence that the defendant’s private attorney. MARCKASOWITZ was not optimistic about the election challenges.
• A December 21 private lunch in which Pence “encouraged'” the defendant not to look at the election ‘as a loss – just an intermission. “” This was followed later in the day by a private discussion in the Oval Office in which the defendant asked Pence, what do you think we should do?” Pence said, “after we have exhausted every legal process in the courts and Congress, if we still came up short, [the defendant] should ‘take a bow.”
• Discussions in which Pence apprised the defendant of conversations he had had with governors in Arizona and Georgia in the context of “election challenges,” in which Pence had called the governors “simply to gather information and share it with the president,” and in which the governors did not report evidence of fraud in the elections in their states and explained that they could not take actions to convene their states legislatures.

But the defendant disregarded ERICHERSHMANN and Pence in the same way that he disregarded dozens of court decisions that unanimously rejected his and his allies’ legal claims, as well as officials in the targeted states—including those in his own party—who stated publicly that he had lost and that his specific fraud allegations were false. Election officials, for instance, issued press releases and other public statements to combat the disinformation that the defendant and his allies were spreading. At one point, long after the defendant had begun spreading false fraud claims, NICKLUNA a White House staffer traveling with the defendant overheard him tell family.

The defendant and his co-conspirators also demonstrated their deliberate disregard for the truth—and thus their knowledge of falsity—when they repeatedly changed the numbers in their baseless fraud allegations from day to day. At trial, the Government will introduce several instances of this pattern, in which the defendant and conspirators’ lies were proved by the fact that they made up figures from whole cloth. One example concerns the defendant and conspirators’ claims about non-citizen voters in Arizona. The conspirators started with the allegation that 36,000 non-citizens voted in Arizona; five days later, it was “beyond credulity that a few hundred thousand didn’t vote”; three weeks later, the bare minimum was 40 or 50,000. The reality is about 250,000; days after that, the assertion was 32,000; and ultimately, the conspirators landed back where they started, at 36,000—a false figure that they never verified or corroborated.

Ultimately, the defendant’s steady stream of disinformation in the post-election period culminated in the speech he gave at a privately funded, privately organized rally at the Ellipse on the morning of January 6, 2021, in advance of the official proceeding in which Congress was to certify the election in favor of Biden. In his speech, the defendant repeated the same lies about election fraud in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin that had been publicly or directly debunked. The defendant 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.