Judge: Trump knew vote fraud claims in legal docs were false

Former President Donald Trump signed legal documents challenging the results of the 2020 election that included voter fraud claims he knew to be false, a federal judge said in a ruling Wednesday.

U.S. District Court Judge David Carter in an 18-page opinion ordered the release of those emails between Trump and attorney John Eastman to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. He said those communications cannot be withheld because they include evidence of potential crimes.

"The emails show that President Trump knew that the specific numbers of voter fraud were wrong but continued to tout those numbers, both in court and to the public," Carter wrote.

Though the judge's conclusion has no practical bearing on a separate Justice Department investigation into efforts to overturn the election, any evidence that Trump signed documents he knew to be false could at minimum be a notable data point for criminal prosecutors trying to sort out culpability for far-ranging efforts to undo the results.

The judge specifically cited claims from Trump's attorneys that Fulton County in Georgia had improperly counted more than 10,000 votes of dead people, felons and unregistered voters. Those false allegations were part of a filing that Trump's legal team made in Georgia state court on Dec. 4, 2021.

Later that month, Eastman warned in a message that Trump had been made aware that "some of the allegations (and evidence proffered by the experts)" in that Georgia filing "has been inaccurate."

Yet even after the message from Eastman, Trump and his team filed another legal complaint that had "the same inaccurate numbers," the judge wrote. Trump under oath verified the complaint was true to the best of his knowledge.