Trump campaign staffer wanted rioting to obstruct Detroit vote counting, prosecutors say

DETROIT — Federal prosecutors alleged in a court filing Tuesday that a campaign employee of former President Donald Trump “encouraged rioting” to obstruct the counting of votes in Detroit after the November 2020 election.

The revelation drew a direct connection between the frenzy that took place at Detroit’s riverfront convention center the day after the Nov. 3, 2020, election and the Trump campaign, which later trumpeted unproven and false theories of voter fraud in Michigan’s largest city. The new allegation came in a nine-page notice about evidence special counsel Jack Smith plans to introduce as part of his criminal case against Trump, focused on his efforts to overturn the election, in the District of Columbia.

Democrats who monitored the counting of votes in Detroit said they weren’t surprised by Smith’s finding, but supporters of Trump denied that the claim was true.

Smith’s team has evidence that Trump and his co-conspirators had knowledge of “unfavorable election results” and an intent “subvert them,” according to the filing. Trump lost Michigan to Democrat Joe Biden by 154,000 votes or 3 percentage points.

A Trump campaign staffer exchanged a series of text messages with a lawyer who was supporting the campaign at Huntington Place in Detroit — then known as TCF Center — Smith’s team alleged. In 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,” the court document added.

The two individuals weren’t identified in the record. And the next eight lines of the filing were redacted.

“The government will also show that around the time of these messages, an election official at the TCF Center observed that as 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,” prosecutors added after the redactions.

Smith charged Trump on Aug. 1 with conspiracy to defraud the U.S., conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, conspiracy against rights and obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

Trump campaign spokesman Steven Cheung told the national publication The Messenger on Tuesday that Smith and others “are getting so desperate to attack President Trump that they are perverting justice by trying to include claims that weren’t anywhere to be found in their dreamt up, fake indictment.”

Republican groups in Michigan urgently told their members to travel to Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020, to monitor the counting of absentee ballots in the Democratic stronghold. The rush of people led to clashes over GOP observers’ access to where votes were being counted and an unsuccessful lawsuit by Trump’s campaign to temporarily halt the tallying of votes in the state’s largest city.

“Do not let criminals steal our country,” one email to Republicans from the North Oakland Republican Club said on Nov. 4, 2020, the day after the election.

It hasn’t been clear to what extent, Trump’s campaign was involved in coordinating Republicans’ arrival in Detroit on Nov. 4, 2020. But Smith’s new allegation about what transpired in Detroit made sense to David Jaffe, a Metro Detroit lawyer who led the team of Democratic Party-accredited poll challengers inside Huntington Place.

“That is entirely plausible to me and consistent with what we saw happening in the room and outside,” Jaffe said.

There were Trump supporters banging on windows, gathering outside the building and chanting “shut it down” inside the venue, said attorney Mark Brewer, a former chairman of the Michigan Democratic Party who was inside Huntington Place on Nov. 4, 2020.

Brewer said he’s never seen such disruptive behavior inside a place votes were counted before.

But Meshawn Maddock, former co-chairwoman of the Michigan Republican Party, said Smith’s allegation was “ridiculous.”

“All we wanted was equal access to the room,” Maddock said of the convention hall where votes were counted. “There was nothing more than chanting.”

The Republican-controlled Michigan Senate Oversight Committee spent months examining the 2020 election. Its June 2021 report said the acts of GOP officials “furthered the crisis” at Huntington Place by putting out the call to other members and citizens to descend on the location to stop what was described and presented as a stealing of the election.”

“The descent into disorder with so many extremely concerned citizens elicited responses from poll workers that seemed necessary to them at the time, such as covering windows, calling police, denying lawful challenges and removing challengers,” the report said.

“Those actions by both sides were not always lawful or wise, and increased the angst and fears of the untrained challengers and observers, as well as the many in the public who did not understand what was shown to them by the media,” the report added.

On Nov. 5, 2020, Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal attorney, retweeted messages about Detroit, saying the doors had been locked and Detroit officials were not allowing the public to observe the counting process. One of his posts was shared more than 3,000 times, but his claims have been rejected by election officials.

Fourteen days later, Giuliani publicly suggested Trump would win Michigan if the votes from Wayne County, where Detroit is located, weren’t included.

Then, during a speech from the White House on Dec. 2, 2020, Trump labeled Detroit “totally corrupt” and said there had been a “vote dump of 149,772 votes” there the morning after Election Day

Trump made the comment publicly despite being told by Attorney General William Barr on Dec. 1, 2020, that “what had occurred in Michigan had been the normal vote-counting process,” and there was “no indication of fraud in Detroit,” according to Smith’s original indictment of Trump.