Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith is now partially treating the January 6 probe as a wire fraud investigation, with a focus on whether former President Donald Trump and his allies committed a crime by using lies about the election being stolen to raise money for a cause they knew was illegitimate, according to new reporting by The Washington Post.
Reporter Devlin Barrett elaborated on the implications of this move on CNN Thursday evening.
""We've known that they were looking — the special counsel's office was looking at this question of was there essentially wire fraud or some sort of fraud in the email fundraising that went on after the election," Barrett told host Anderson Cooper.
"What's important here, I think, is, we're seeing them drilling down onto this question to ask a very specific question, which is: how are these email solicitations? How are they crafted? How are they written? How are they changed and edited? And what were the people making those pitches for money saying to each other about these claims? Because there's one comparison case where you could say that the claims that were being made, the appeal is being made for money, were being made by people who in some ways may have known that they were not telling the truth."
"And that is the real question that prosecutors have to try to answer here," added Barrett. "Was there a known misstatement, known misrepresentations to just generate money? Because these appeals generated tens of millions of dollars."
Watch the video at this link.
Devlin Barrett on Jack Smith's wire fraud investigation of Trump's campaign emailswww.youtube.com
