'Blur the line between campaign and court': Trump legal strategy turns to 'baseless' Jan. 6 conspiracies

05 December 2023

The 2024 presidential election is shaping up to be unlike any other in United States history. Donald Trump, according to countless polls, remains the clear GOP frontrunner despite facing four criminal indictments — two of which involve his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and remain in power after losing to now-President Joe Biden.

Trump continues to claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him — a conspiracy theory that has been repeatedly debunked. And on the campaign trial, the Washington Post reports in an article published on December 4, Trump has also been pushing fringe conspiracy theories about the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building.

"Ever since he was indicted on charges of interfering in the 2020 election results," Post reporters Rachel Weiner and Isaac Arnsdorf explain, "Donald Trump has relished the chance to use the case in Washington as a venue to air his baseless claims of fraud. Now, he is using it to circulate a new set of falsehoods: that the federal government staged or incited violence at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, to discredit Trump and his supporters."

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The reporters add, "In court filings last week, the former president revealed that he has been pressing the Justice Department for information on far-right claims often elevated in his speeches, on his social media feeds and by his conservative allies in Congress — further blurring the line between his campaign and his court battles."

Trump, Weiner and Arnsdorf note, has been "suggesting that the government is withholding information on people known as 'Fence Cutter Bulwark' and 'Scaffold Commander' — nicknames given by conspiracy theorists to people they claim are government agents who instigated the January 6 riot."

Trump, the Post reporters add, has also been seeking government "intelligence" on the leftist antifa movement, which conspiracy theorists claim was involved in the January 6 insurrection.

According to attorney Greg Hunter, who has represented some of the January 6 defendants, there is no evidence whatsoever linking Antifa to the attack on the Capitol.

Hunter told the Post, "Between the hundreds of people who have looked through it, none of us have come up with the antifa provocateurs or the federal agent provocateurs that we keep hearing about. It's because they're not there. There are a lot of people looking, and nobody's found it."

The Washington's full report is available at this link (subscription required).

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