Trump campaign staffer tried to incite riot in Michigan to stop vote count: Jack Smith

An unnamed campaign employee of former President Donald Trump tried to start a riot in Detroit, Michigan, to obstruct the counting of votes in the 2020 election, special counsel Jack Smith claimed in a new filing this week Tuesday..

According to the new filing, the Trump agent, who has not been indicted, got in touch with officials on Nov. 4, 2020 — the day after election day.

"The Campaign Employee exchanged a series of text messages with an attorney supporting the Campaign’s election day operations at the TCF Center in Detroit, where votes were being counted," Smith's office wrote.

"[I]n 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."

It went on, "An election official at the TCF [convention] 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 continued in the filing.

The filing, according to The Washington Post, also more broadly alleges that the former president "sent" his supporters on a path to the violence that took place on January 6 at the U.S. Capitol.

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“Evidence of the defendant’s post-conspiracy embrace of particularly violent and notorious rioters is admissible to establish the defendant’s motive and intent on January 6 — that he sent supporters, including groups like the Proud Boys, whom [sic] he knew were angry, and whom he now calls ‘patriots,’ to the Capitol to achieve the criminal objective of obstructing the congressional certification,” wrote Smith's prosecutors.

These sorts of uprisings to try to stop vote counting have taken place before; most famously, in 2000, a group of right-wing activists stormed the vote counting center in Miami-Dade County, Florida, to try to disrupt the hotly disputed recount, an event that came to be known as the "Brooks Brothers Riot."