‘Make them riot’: New court filing reveals how prosecutors say Trump and his allies sought to overturn Pennsylvania’s 2020 vote

Federal prosecutors have delivered their most extensive accounting to date of the evidence they say proves former President Donald Trump criminally conspired with others to overturn the 2020 election.

In a much-anticipated brief unsealed Wednesday, special counsel Jack Smith laid out his findings in an effort to convince U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan that his election interference case against the former president can proceed despite the Supreme Court’s July ruling on presidential immunity.

While the names of key players were redacted throughout, the 165-page filing revealed new details on the efforts Trump and his allies are accused of undertaking in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.

Here are some of the local highlights:

Smith alleged that, while votes were being counted in Pennsylvania and across the country, Trump and his allies sought to sow confusion and chaos at locations where that tabulation was taking place.

One particularly notable incident, cited in the brief, involved a prominent GOP operative from Philadelphia.

Kensington native Mike Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day operations in 2020, cut his teeth in Philadelphia’s Republican circles before rising to prominence as a GOP “fraud hunter” and online provocateur. Various investigations have identified him as one of the key figures in organizing the seven slates of fake Trump electors from battleground states, and he’s facing charges for his role in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin.

» READ MORE: A Philly political strategist played a ‘major operational role’ in Trump’s fake elector scheme

While Roman’s name is redacted in Smith’s brief, details the special counsel included in his description of one Trump coconspirator match what was previously known about Roman’s involvement in the 2020 campaign.

But Wednesday’s filing revealed one Nov. 4, 2020, incident that has not been previously reported. The day after the election, Roman had his eyes on the vote count in Detroit, where Trump campaign operatives had been dispatched to investigate the validity of a batch of votes for Joe Biden that had just been added to his total.

A colleague informed Roman that those Biden votes appeared to be correct, Smith said.

Roman responded: “Find a reason it isn’t … Give me options to file litigation.”

That reply, Smith argued, shows Trump and his allies knew there was no validity to their claims of fraud and that they sought, instead, to use misinformation and insinuation to rally supporters.

When the operative later told Roman that such claims had drawn rowdy crowds of Trump supporters to the Detroit vote tabulation center and that he feared there could be violence, Roman was allegedly unconcerned.

“Make them riot,” he said, according to Smith’s filing. “Do it!!!”

Many of the most bizarre postelection moments in Pennsylvania featured Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani — from his stumbling courtroom performance in which he sought to persuade a judge, citing no evidence, that a cabal of Democratic officials had conspired to steal the election to his fever dream of a news conference outside Four Seasons Total Landscaping in Philadelphia.

But one notable incident involving Giuliani — a Nov. 25, 2020, state Senate committee hearing in Gettysburg — received special attention in Smith’s brief because of the dissension it caused behind the scenes.

That day, Giuliani and Trump attorney Jenna Ellis pressed their baseless case of a stolen election before a sympathetic panel of Republican state lawmakers led by State Sen. Doug Mastriano. They repeated several already discredited claims, including that the state had received more absentee ballots than it had mailed out.

Justin Riemer, chief counsel for the Republican National Committee, was watching from afar and publicly tweeted: “This is not true.”

He followed up days later with an email to an RNC spokesperson, Smith said, saying Giuliani and Ellis were “getting laughed out of court” and “misleading millions of people who have wishful thinking that the president is somehow going to win this thing.”

Giuliani later learned of Riemer’s comments, Smith said, and left the RNC counsel a threatening voice mail.

“Call me, or I’ll call the boss and get you to resign,” Giuliani allegedly said. “It’d be better for you if you do.”

Riemer was later relieved of his duties as chief counsel, after Giuliani put pressure on then-RNC chair Ronna McDaniel to dismiss him.

But Riemer wasn’t the only one to balk at the claims Giuliani made at the hearing.

Smith’s brief quotes an exchange between two other Trump campaign staffers. One wrote in an email that Giuliani’s claims on absentee ballots in Pennsylvania were “just wrong” and that there was “no way to defend it.”

“We have been saying this for a while,” Trump’s deputy campaign manager Justin Clark allegedly responded. “It’s very frustrating.”

Efforts by Trump and his allies to organize rival slates of fraudulent electors who would purport to cast the electoral votes for seven battleground states make up a significant portion of Smith’s case against the former president.

And in Pennsylvania, 20 prominent Republicans signed on to the effort, including former U.S. Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta; Allegheny County Council member Sam DeMarco; state GOP Vice Chair Bernadette Comfort; Bucks County GOP chair Pat Poprik; Republican National Committee member Andy Reilly; Kevin Harley, a former spokesperson for Gov. Tom Corbett; and Ted Christian, a top Trump strategist in the state.

But while criminal charges have since been filed against some “false electors” from other states, Smith described a skepticism among Trump’s Pennsylvania electors that may have saved them from the same fate.

And, according to Smith, they primarily have one man to thank: Lawrence Tabas, an election lawyer and chair of the Pennsylvania Republican Party. Smith says Tabas had informed Trump as early as a day after the 2020 vote that he hadn’t lost Pennsylvania because of fraud.

» READ MORE: What to know about the Pennsylvania fake electors mentioned in Trump's indictment

As Trump’s allies sought to organize Pennsylvania’s “false elector” slate in December, Roman, Trump’s director of Election Day operations, complained to another Trump ally that Tabas was telling potential recruits if they sign the petition they could be prosecuted,” according to Smith’s filing.

Giuliani and other Trump campaign operatives organized a conference call the next day with the potential electors, who demanded a clause be included in the filing they would eventually send to Congress, making clear that they were only putting themselves forward as legitimate presidential electors if a court overturned Pennsylvania’s election results.

Pennsylvania’s false electors were one of the only slates to include such language — a precaution Gov. Josh Shapiro, when he was attorney general, cited as a factor that would make it difficult to prosecute them.

But Trump’s campaign wasn’t happy. As Giuliani was leading that Dec. 12 conference call, Roman was texting with Ellis, the Trump campaign lawyer, and balked at the resistance from the Pennsylvania electors.

“Whoever selected this slate should be shot,” Roman allegedly said.

Ellis, according to Smith, responded: “We couldn’t have found 20 people better than this???”