Special counsel pushes to use Pence against Trump in 2020 election case

Special counsel prosecutors intend to make Donald Trump’s vice-president Mike Pence and his efforts to recruit fake electors the centerpiece of his criminal prosecution against the former president, according to a sprawling legal brief that was partly unsealed on Wednesday.

The redacted brief, made public by the presiding US district judge Tanya Chutkan, shows prosecutors are relying extensively on Trump’s pressure campaign against Pence to support the charge that Trump conspired to obstruct the January 6 certification of the election results.

Related: Special counsel reveals new details of Trump bid to overturn 2020 election

And prosecutors used an equally voluminous portion of the 165-page brief to express their intent to use evidence of Trump trying to get officials in seven key swing states to reverse his defeat to support the charges that he conspired to disenfranchise American voters.

The brief’s principal mission was to convince Chutkan to allow the allegations and evidence buttressing the superseding indictment against Trump to proceed to trial, arguing that it complied with the US supreme court’s recent ruling that gave former presidents immunity for official acts.

As part of the ruling, the court ordered Chutkan to sort through the indictment and decide which of the allegations against Trump should be tossed because of the immunity rules and which could proceed to trial.

The brief was the first round of that process that could take months to resolve and involve hearings to decide what allegations should be kept. Chutkan has the power to decide how much of the indictment can be kept and what evidence can be presented by prosecutors as she makes her decision.

According to the redacted brief, prosecutors want to use Trump’s conversations with Pence in the lead-up to the January 6 Capitol attack, interactions between Trump and Pence and other private actors, as well as interactions between White House aides and private actors.

The bottom line from prosecutors was that each of the episodes reflected Trump acting not as president but as a candidate for office, which meant the default presumption that conversations between Trump and Pence were official could be rebutted.

For instance, prosecutors argued that evidence of Trump using personal lawyers Rudy Giuliani or John Eastman to pressure Pence should be permitted, since using private actors to commit a crime would not be an official act of the presidency or infringe on the functioning of the…