Special counsel Jack Smith plans to use Donald Trump’s 2020 phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger as evidence against the former president in his Washington, D.C., election fraud trial.
On Wednesday, Judge Tanya Chutkan released Smith’s findings in the case to the public, and within the redacted 165-page document is the prosecutor’s contention that Trump’s infamous phone call does not fall under presidential immunity as defined by the Supreme Court in its July 1 ruling.
The Supreme Court ruling contended that a U.S. president is immune from “official acts” conducted in their capacity as the nation’s chief executive, dealing a major obstacle to the multiple legal cases against Trump. The former president was initially indicted for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election back in August 2023, but after the Supreme Court’s ruling, Smith filed a superseding indictment, over a year later, taking the expansion of immunity into account.
In his 2020 call to Raffensperger, Trump asked the Georgia secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.” In his legal filing, Smith argues that the phone call “was purely a private one, which [Trump] undertook as a candidate and the plaintiff in a lawsuit,” noting that a federal district court already determined that it was a “campaign call rather than official business.”
Smith’s filing also points out, “Under the Constitution, the Executive Branch has no constitutionally assigned role in the state-electoral process. To the contrary, the constitutional framework excludes the president from that process to protect against electoral abuses.”
Smith is hoping that this case against the former president—arguably the most damning of the criminal charges against him—can withstand the Supreme Court’s constraints on what criminal charges a president can actually face. Trump’s efforts to overturn the presidential election in 2020 led to the Capitol insurrection on January 6, 2021, and he has not faced any legal consequences for his involvement with the riot. He still refuses to commit to accepting the results of an election in which he loses.
There’s no telling what Trump will do if the 2024 election doesn’t go his way, and that is in part because he still has not faced legal consequences for his actions in the last presidential election. Smith is hoping that Trump can finally face accountability and to ensure that American elections are never threatened again.
