The Network Behind Trump’s Election Lies Hasn’t Backed Down — Despite His Indictment

A key point of Donald Trump’s indictment Tuesday ― for allegedly conspiring to overthrow the 2020 election results and deprive Americans of their voting rights ― is prosecutors’ allegation that Trump knowingly spread lies about the election.

Trump, of course, has been unapologetic, referring to the charges against him as “fake” and “un-American.” On Thursday, shortly before his scheduled arraignment, he again falsely claimed that the election was stolen. “I AM NOW GOING TO WASHINGTON, D.C., TO BE ARRESTED FOR HAVING CHALLENGED A CORRUPT, RIGGED, & STOLEN ELECTION,” he wrote in all caps on Truth Social.

But Trump’s attempts to overturn the election were enabled by a fertile environment to bolster his groundless claims. Several co-conspirators allegedly helped manufacture and push the lies that fueled his attempt to steal a second term, per the indictment, in addition to a network of supporters who have invested their time and energy over the past three years in supporting the big lie. While none of these allies were charged in the indictment ― Trump is the sole named defendant ― it’s hard to deny the culture of election denial they helped create.

Of these associates, one thing has become clear in recent days: Most of them haven’t changed course, and in fact have doubled down on their support of the former president. Trump relied on an army of political operatives and other figures for his 2020 election theft attempt. Those people are still around — and potentially available for another try.

The Alleged Co-Conspirators

The indictment doesn’t name Trump’s alleged co-conspirators, who are referred to as Numbers 1-6. Nor does it charge them with any crimes, though special counsel Jack Smith noted Tuesday that “our investigation of other individuals continues.” But it’s not difficult to match actions to the names of some of Trump’s most prominent advisers as he tried to hold on to power after the 2020 election.

Former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell ― apparently “Co-Conspirator 3” in the indictment ― was sanctioned in federal court for her baseless election fraud claims, which included a November 2020 Trump campaign press conference where she claimed a “massive influence of Communist money” had affected the 2020 elections. Later, she and others reportedly urged Trump to seize voting machines nationwide. The voting machine company Dominion is pursuing a defamation suit against Powell.

But even after Tuesday’s indictment, Powell hasn’t slowed down. On Wednesday, she shared an article on Telegram from her group Defending the Republic, titled “Busting Through the Wall of Lies.” That post linked to an article at the conspiracy theory website Gateway Pundit, which claimed, based solely on one analysis of a few hundred absentee ballots, that “up to 34,000 illegal ballots” were tallied in Detroit in 2020.

The analysis ominously noted a “difference in printing appearance” between some ballots, and the fact that “the ballot paper felt different on some of the ballots.” Powell didn’t return HuffPost’s request for comment.

Other alleged co-conspirators have responded directly to this week’s indictment. Attorneys for John Eastman (apparently “Co-Conspirator 2”), who allegedly “devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election,” criticized the charges in a statement to NBC News.

The indictment, Eastman’s statement said, “relies on a misleading presentation of the record to contrive criminal charges against Presidential candidate Trump and to cast ominous aspersions on his close advisors.”

Rudy Giuliani ― apparently “Co-Conspirator 1,” and perhaps second only to Trump in his lies about the election ― portrayed the indictment as a violation of Trump’s free speech, even though the indictment alleges that Trump went far beyond speech, initiating multiple conspiracies to try and steal a second term.

On his podcast Tuesday night, Giuliani, who did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment, stuck by the claims of massive election fraud, though he characterized them as Trump’s “belief” based on rapidly changing facts on the ground.

“If you believe that vast and very large fraud took place in an election, and you have an overwhelming amount of evidence to that effect ― at an early stage, because that evidence changes quite frequently, because it comes in in a frenetic, emergency kind of way...” Giuliani said, before trailing off to a different point and accusing election officials of seeking to hide evidence of wrongdoing. 

“I know this sounds strange, and nobody did that here, but you have a right to lie under the First Amendment,” he added. After musing that Attorney General Merrick Garland himself ought to be charged with one of the offenses listed in Trump’s indictment, Giuliani launched into a vitamin advertisement, eating several pills and scooping a fiber supplement into a glass of water: “I’m telling you, we don’t have enough fiber!”

The Crowd Source

Other Trump lies were so widespread they seemed to be in the GOP bloodstream, such as claims that fraudulent “ballot dumps” swayed the election.

In reality, those “dumps” were mostly just large urban centers uploading tallies of legitimate ballots all at once into their unofficial records. In some cases, they were also quickly corrected errors: After election tickers showed a sudden spike for Joe Biden in Michigan in the early hours of Nov. 4, some Trump supporters panicked. Trump appears to have heard about the spike for the first time from the far-right commentator Matt Walsh, who tweeted that it was “reason enough to go to court.” That same morning, Shiawassee County elections clerk Abigail Bowen told The New York Times that the issue simply arose from “an extra zero that got typed in,” and that the record had been corrected. Nonetheless, Trump brought it up in tweets and speeches for a month, even after, according to the indictment, the attorney general told him no wrongdoing had occurred.

Walsh, like Trump, has apparently not changed his mind about 2020. On Wednesday, he characterized Trump’s indictment as yet one more step into “our descent into a banana republic.” 

“We are witnessing the criminalization of political dissent for all Americans, no matter how powerful or well off they may be, or may not be,” Walsh said, before noting that Trump was charged with the same crime as Douglass Mackey, a far-right troll convicted in March of attempting to suppress the 2016 vote by advertising a false vote-by-text number aimed at Clinton supporters.

Attorney Sidney Powell speaks during a news conference with Rudy Giuliani about lawsuits contesting the results of the presidential election in Washington, D.C., Nov. 19, 2020.

Sometimes, the variety of sources for one of Trump’s false claims was overwhelming. In Nevada, for example, the campaign pursued a lawsuit claiming that more than 40,000 of Biden’s votes were illegitimate, saying it was grounds for Trump to be declared the state’s actual winner. The indictment referred to this as Trump’s claim “that there had been tens of thousands of double votes and other fraud in Nevada.”

Among Trump campaign attorney Jesse Binnall’s allegations at the time was that 42,284 people had voted twice. “This election was unfortunately stolen,” Binnall said. A page on the Nevada GOP’s website, which is still live today, reads: “42,284 Nevadans appear to have cared more for politics than character.”

Multiplecourts were unconvinced. Fact-checks found the claims were false. As a state district court judge, James Russell, wrote, Trump’s campaign “failed to meet their burden to provide credible and relevant evidence.”

Separately, two days after Election Day, the Trump campaign held a press conference featuring multiple heavy hitters of election denialism. Former Nevada Attorney General Adam Laxalt (R) claimed that “thousands” of voters participated in the election despite having moved away beforehand. Richard Grenell, Trump’s former acting director of national intelligence, claimed there was “publicly available evidence” showing that non-residents had voted. “The presidency literally hangs in the balance,” said Matt Schlapp, the chairman of the Conservative Political Action Coalition and a top Trump surrogate.

In the wake of Trump’s indictment for conspiracy based in falsehoods about the election, most of these advocates appear undeterred.

Schlapp urged Republican legislators to “defund” Smith, the special prosecutor who brought the indictment against Trump. “It will take shutting things down, but in the end, if they don’t fear our authority, they will imprison us and take down American Constitutionalism,” he said.

Grenell called for “impeachment” ― of whom, he didn’t specify ― and wrote that Smith had “lost touch with Free Speech and the U.S. Constitution” because he’d lived in Europe. (Grenell was Trump’s ambassador to Germany at the same time Smith lived in the Netherlands.)

Binnall retweeted them both.

Laxalt, on the other hand, hadn’t commented on the indictment as of Thursday afternoon. He’s leading a super PAC supporting Ron DeSantis’ bid for the 2024 GOP presidential nomination.

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