No. of Recommendations: 4
A key part of these laws is that they revolve around a person's intent. Intent is core to the notion of fraud: Only if somebody is knowingly trying to deceive others can he be committing a fraud. If he is spouting falsehoods that he genuinely believes, he isn't participating in an illegal conspiracy.
That's why this case seems likely to revolve around Trump's state of mind. The first page of the indictment, referring to his claims of election fraud, states, 'These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.' By contrast, Trump's defense lawyers are likely to argue that he truly believed he had won. By airing his honest views, the lawyers will explain, he was exercising his right to free speech, The Times's Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman write.
IIRC the fraud in the case isn't the verbal claims, Jack Smith even said that in leading up to the charges, the fraud committed is false slates of electors being submitted as real electors to the US Government. There may be more frauds, but that is the main one. So we don't care what he believed (though a jury likes to know), we do care that his intent was to submit fraudulent electors. And also that he had the intent to cause the obstruction of the vote counting, and in so doing deprive people of the right to have there vote counted by substituting his fraudulent state of electors.
And these are layered in in four separate charges, designed as such that if one charge is lost on appeal, the other three should stick.
