Many defenders of former President Donald Trump have been claiming that the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building isn’t something that he encouraged or condoned in any way. And far-right conspiracy theorists have falsely blamed everyone from FBI agents to leftist antifa supporters for the attack — with no evidence to support those claims.
But special counsel Jack Smith’s office, according to The Guardian’s Hugo Lowell, has “indicated” that it is planning to feature three witnesses at Trump’s election interference trial “who could potentially show how January 6 rioters moved on the Capitol in response to the former president’s tweets.”
Lowell, in an article published on December 11, explains, “The witnesses, according to a three-page filing, involve two experts on geolocation data to show the crowd’s movement during and after Trump’s speech at the Ellipse, and an expert on cellular phone data to testify about when and how Trump’s phone was being used — including over the same time period. Expert 3 will testify that they extracted data from official government phones belonging to Trump and one unnamed individual, how the phones were used in the post-2020 election period, including the websites visited, and when Trump’s phone accessed Twitter during January 6.”
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Smith and his team are prosecuting two separate federal cases against Trump — one involving classified government documents being stored at Mar-a-Lago, the other on Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Smith alleges that Trump violated federal laws when he lost the 2020 election to now-President Joe Biden but tried to stay in the White House anyway.
“In recent weeks,” Lowell reports, “prosecutors have made it increasingly clear that they want to make the case that Trump sought to obstruct the January 6 congressional certification of the election results with the rioters by tying him to the Capitol attack, as well as through political means. The notice about the subject of the expert witness testimony suggests prosecutors also intend to make the case that Trump — through his action and inaction — simultaneously advanced the physical obstruction of Congress as the Capitol attack progressed.”
Lowell adds, “Testimony from the first two geolocation experts will help to ‘aid the jury in understanding the movements of individuals toward the Capitol area during and after the defendant’s speech at the Ellipse,’ the filing said.”
The Guardian’s full report is available at this link.