News Roundup: Trump’s Co-Conspirators

The 45-page, four-count indictment handed down on Tuesday, accusing Donald Trump of plotting to upend democracy to cling to power, tells a stunning story.

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The 45-page, four-count indictment handed down on Tuesday, accusing Donald Trump of plotting to upend democracy to cling to power, tells a stunning story. While many of those most damning facts have been known for months, if not years, the indictment does contain new details that prosecutors say show a key aspect of the charges: That the former president knew his accusations about election fraud were lies — and that he repeated them anyway in the hope of overturning the will of voters.

As we outline here, documents we’ve exposed have helped show in black and white how Trump and his allies worked to undermine the peaceful transition of power — from the plot to submit fake electoral certificates falsely claiming Trump won states he actually lost to the attempted corruption of the U.S. Justice Department and his efforts to interfere in the Georgia recount.

The indictment describes each of these components of the anti-democratic scheme and in so doing underscores a basic principle — that no one is above the law. It also details how six co-conspirators assisted in this brazen effort to thwart democracy.

They include Jeffrey Clark, the former Justice Department official who was willing to use the power of federal law enforcement to bolster Trump’s lies. The Washington Post reported this week on how, despite his actions, Clark has become a rising star in right-wing circles.
Records we obtained, highlighted by the Post in its story, include an email from just two days after the Jan. 6 insurrection in which Clark told Jeffrey Rosen, then acting attorney general, that he had “left a legacy of accomplishment starting after my confirmation” and that while he and Rosen were often in agreement, “no one can agree on all things and reasonable minds can differ.”
Rosen later wrote to a colleague: “I am not going to respond to Jeff Clark’s message given the events that took place with him. Those were not things on which ‘reasonable minds can differ’ and simply move along.” Read more here about the messages we uncovered.

The other identified co-conspirators are Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, and Kenneth Chesebro. And for many of them, their efforts to undermine democracy did not end on Jan. 6, 2021, as our investigations have revealed. This includes the election “audit” in Arizona, in which Giuliani played a significant role — more details below.

On the Records

Rudy Giuliani’s Involvement in Arizona Audit
Giuliani, who has been identified as “Co-conspirator 1” in the Trump indictment, may have helped assign a volunteer to the sham Arizona “audit” in 2021, according to records reported on by the Arizona Republic this week and previously released to American Oversight.

“I was just asked to help on the AZ Audit starting on April 22nd for 15 days,” a volunteer wrote in an April 2021 email. “This is all under the authorization of Christina Bobb, who works with Rudy.” (Bobb, then a reporter for the right-wing OAN Network, fundraised for the “audit.”)
Bobb played an active role in the “audit” and helped connect Doug Logan, the CEO of lead “audit” contractor Cyber Ninjas, with those who helped launch the partisan election review in Wisconsin.
As we’ve previously reported, Giuliani was in frequent contact with Arizona Senate President Karen Fann in the months before the “audit” was officially launched. In December 2021, Fann wrote that she had “spoken with Mayor Giuliani at least 6 times over the past two weeks,” and that she had his full support as well as “a personal call from President Trump thanking us for pushing to prove any fraud.”

Yellow’s CARES Act Loan
Last week, the trucking company Yellow Corp. informed its employees that it is shutting down all of its locations. Yellow Corp. received a $700 million pandemic loan that came through a CARES Act program meant to provide financial support to businesses “critical to maintaining national security.” The loan had raised questions about the company’s ties to the Trump White House and its importance to national security.

In 2022, the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Crisis released a report that cited records we obtained, finding that Trump administration officials overruled the Defense Department to approve the loan.
Records we obtained from the Treasury show top officials — former Secretary Steve Mnuchin, economic adviser Larry Kudlow, White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and President Trump’s executive assistant — in contact regarding the announcement of the loan. Read more about those findings here.

News Roundup: Trump’s Co-Conspirators

On the Records

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