The Daily Fuckup

A special counsel filing made public on Dec. 10, 2023, added another brick to the record against Donald Trump’s voting-machine fraud claims. Prosecutors said they asked former Trump administration and election-security officials whether they were aware of evidence that any domestic or foreign actor had flipped votes in voting machines during the 2020 election. The filing says none of those officials reported such evidence. The brief itself is dated Dec. 11, 2023. ([storage.courtlistener.com](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.181.0.pdf))

The government’s point is not subtle. Prosecutors are using those witness summaries to argue that Trump kept repeating a machine-fraud story even though officials with direct familiarity with election security had already told him there was no evidence to support it. The filing names a range of former officials from the intelligence, homeland security, defense, and election-security world and says their answers fit with prior government findings that there was no evidence of foreign interference that changed votes, altered voting machines, or compromised vote counting. ([storage.courtlistener.com](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.181.0.pdf))

This is still a prosecutorial filing, not a court ruling. It does not decide Trump’s intent or the criminal case itself. But it does supply prosecutors with a cleaner version of the same argument they have been making for months: the machine-fraud claim was not a misunderstood technical detail; it was a claim that former senior officials had already told him they could not support with evidence. ([storage.courtlistener.com](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.181.0.pdf))

The filing also draws a line between real election-security issues and the claim that voting machines switched votes. Prosecutors say network breaches, influence campaigns, and other election-related problems are not the same thing as proof that voting machines changed ballot counts. In their telling, Trump collapsed those distinctions to keep a fraud story alive that the record did not support. ([storage.courtlistener.com](https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148/gov.uscourts.dcd.258148.181.0.pdf))