Trump’s lawyers have questioned Nevadas 2020 vote, records show

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WASHINGTON (AP) Nevada’s most populous county has given the U.S. Justice Department a special counsel letter showing lawyers for former President Donald Trump are expressing concerns about the integrity of the late 2020 voting process. was deemed unfounded, according to documents obtained by The Associated Press.

Trump allies also sought information about workers assigned to count votes, a request the county registrar sought to delay out of fear for workers’ safety.

The correspondence was provided by Clark County to Jack Smith, the special counsel tasked with investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the election results, in response to a subpoena seeking communications between by Trump associates and county officials. Smith has issued similar subpoenas to officials in other battleground states, including Arizona, Michigan and Wisconsin, as prosecutors probe a pressure campaign aimed at keeping Trump in power.

The AP obtained the documents Tuesday through a public records request in Clark County, which includes Las Vegas and which along with Nevada in general has been a hotbed for conspiracy theories stemming from the false claim. of election fraud.

The records do not include any communications from Trump himself and do not appear to show attempts to coerce county officials, as Trump tried to do in Georgia. But they show how Trump’s lawyers have for weeks positioned themselves for legal challenges after the county election. They alleged that thousands of ballots were improperly cast and, weeks before the election, filed a public records request seeking to review the process by which mail-in and absentee ballots were counted.

Among the documents given to Smith was a letter from lawyers for the Trump campaign to the Clark County district attorney on Nov. 5, 2020, two days after Election Day. It claims 3,062 voters who moved from Nevada before the general election voted in the state and the number is likely to grow by an additional six thousand.

Lawyers wrote that the lax procedures for verifying voter identity called into question the legitimacy of the entire state election.

But the Nevada secretary of states office definitively dismissed that claim in a report the following April. The report said many of the voters the Nevada Republican Party said moved out of state or abroad before the election actually moved to cities and towns adjacent to military bases.

It also noted that there are many legitimate reasons for a person to request a change of postal address while maintaining their original Nevada voter registration address.

In addition, a labor-intensive public records request from Trump’s lawyers, filed as county officials prepare for an Election Day less than two weeks away, sought photos of voter signatures on envelope containing postal ballots. Trump’s lawyers also want information about mail-in ballots that were cast in the election without voter signatures or with signatures that did not match those on the voter registration record.

Trump’s lawyers separately sought the names of voters who were part of the Clark County counting board, as well as the political composition of the board for each shift. The county said it would provide that information but for security reasons, not until after the election canvass deadline.

Most of the records released to the AP consist of correspondence between Joe Gloria, at the time the county registrar of voters, and Jesse Law, who was one of six fake electors from the Nevada GOP who signed the certificates that falsely saying that Trump won the state in 2020.

The certificates were sent to Congress and the National Archives, which were ultimately ignored. Law, who was also part of Trumps 2020 operation, primarily sought details of the vote counting process in Clark County.

In an interview last month, before she stepped down, Gloria described the pressure she said she and her staff faced during the 2020 election. He said protesters stood 100 feet (about 30 meters) from his office door, some with weapons, while he and his staff counted ballots.

She received terrifying emails and messages, some reading We know where you live and we know where your family sleeps.

Smith, a veteran war crimes prosecutor who once headed the Justice Department’s section that prosecutes public corruption, was named special counsel in November to investigate attempts by Trump associates to undo the 2020 election results, as well as maintaining classified records on Trumps Florida estate. , Mar-a-Lago.

Within weeks of his appointment, the AP and other news organizations reported on subpoenas sent to local election officials in about a half-dozen battleground states that Trump contested but won. Democrat Joe Biden.

The AP asked Clark County this week for the same records provided to Smith. The county responded with a 35-page document consisting largely of correspondence between attorneys for the Trump campaign and Gloria, as well as public records requests and court documents.

The records do not include any correspondence from some of the more prominent names included in the subpoena, including former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, who helped Trump’s efforts to challenge the election results.

Smith also sent a subpoena to the then-Nevada secretary of state’s office in November, requesting records of communications with a list of Trump-connected officials who have fueled efforts to subvert the 2020 election. office provided only one document in their response of a Zoom invitation between the office and some fake Nevada GOP voters who were not on Smith’s list.

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Stern, who reports from Reno, Nevada, is a corps member for the Associated Press/Report for America Statehouse News Initiative. Report for America is a nonprofit national service program that places journalists in local newsrooms.

Copyright 2023 Associated Press. All rights reserved.

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