CAN PROSECUTORS PERSUADE A JURY THAT TRUMP KNEW HE LOST?

Rolling Stone's Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng report:

WHILE DONALD TRUMP was publicly whipping his supporters into a frenzy over claims that the 2020 election was “stolen,” he was privately mocking his own allies’ outlandish conspiracy theories as “crazy.”

It’s a contradiction that Special Counsel Jack Smith’s office would like to know all about.

According to two sources with knowledge of the situation, federal investigators have questioned multiple witnesses, including some in recent months, about Trump privately suggesting, starting in November 2020, that certain conspiracy theories and “evidence” were nonsensical.

Among these witness accounts are moments of the then-president repeatedly calling Sidney Powell, one of the MAGA lawyers and die-hard Trumpists aiding his effort to stop the transfer of power, “crazy,” and dismissing many of her election-fraud arguments as patently absurd....

The special counsel’s continuing interest in incidents where Trump either seemed to know — or was told by his own aides — that his election-conspiracy theories were baseless suggests that prosecutors are likely preparing to demonstrate that Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were not the result of a reasonable or good-faith belief in conspiracy theories but instead a willful disregard of the facts. Demonstrating that Trump knew he was misleading the public could be a crucial evidentiary hurdle in any attempt to prove Trump engaged in a criminal conspiracy over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

Here's the problem: It appears that Trump may have thought some election conspiracies were "crazy," but he talked as if he thought other theories were plausible. Maybe he didn't really believe any of them, but I don't think we know. I don't agree with Amanda Marcotte, who says, "It's obvious to reality-based people that everyone involved in the Big Lie knew it was a lie." I'm not sure it's obvious. Rudy Giuliani, for instance, is a longtime believer in rigged elections. He thought his loss to David Dinkins in the 1989 New York mayoral election was because of voter fraud ("some people voted eight or ten times" for Dinkins, he claimed). So why wouldn't he believe there was fraud in 2020? I know he's now admitted to falsehoods regarding two Georgia election workers, but he's just trying to minimize the damage from their lawsuit.

Sidney Powell, of course, had some batshit theories:

She told the president that Dominion Voting Systems had rigged their machines to flip votes from Trump to Biden and that it was part of an international communist plot to steal the election for the Democrats.

... Powell ... continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others.

Whereas Trump, in his phone call to Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, asserted something much more down-to-earth: that fake Biden ballots were transported in suitcases to a counting center in Georgia, and that thousands of Biden ballots were cast on behalf of dead people.

I don't know whether Trump really believes this. But the fact that he found some conspiracy theories "crazy" doesn't mean he doubts others.

Whatever he actually believes, I assume his lawyers will simply argue that the election was rigged, to the extent that they're allowed to by the court. Maybe that won't fly with a D.C. jury, if that's where the charges are filed. But if the prosecution needs to prove that he knew he'd lost in order to win a conviction, I think it might be a struggle. And when 68% of Republicans think the election was rigged, it really might be hard to persuade a right-winger on the jury that fraud obviously didn't happen, therefore Trump can't possibly believe it did.