Lawyers on Donald Trump’s legendary “Elite Strike Force” team, many of whom are now struggling to keep their law licenses, face further problems as Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation reportedly reaches into potential fraud in connection to the fake electors scheme and the lawyers’ thin legal justifications for overturning local results, the Washington Post reports.

Smith’s team is looking into efforts by outside counsel Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as then-Justice Department lawyer and non-canonical Attorney General Jeffrey Clark, to provide state legislatures with vaguely plausible legal justifications to overturn elections.  Part of the investigation is looking into how those efforts coordinated with the attempts to appoint fake electors by some state officials, while another prong is looking into if both state-level efforts were coordinated by officials in the Trump campaign or administration.  And of course, they’re looking into how much of these efforts Trump knew about and possibly, what did he personally direct. 

Smith’s also looking at email pitches used by Trump’s campaign and PAC to raise money after the election, using themes of election fraud fights that claimed to have found irregularities.  After Trump’s own legal team reviewed the ads, they couldn’t find any data to support the claims made in the ads.  “The campaign’s own legal team and data experts cannot verify the bullshit being beamed down from the mothership,” a campaign advisor emailed an executive with the ad agency putting the ads together.

Campaign communications like those–in which Trump campaign officials acknowledged the falsity of fraud claims–will help Smith’s prosecutors demonstrate the Trump campaign knowingly attempted to defraud the federal government and the American people to reinstall Donald Trump for a second term.