President Donald Trump’s onslaught of falsehoods about the November election misled millions of Americans, undermined faith in the electoral system, sparked a deadly riot — and has now left taxpayers with a large, and growing, bill.

The total so far: $519 million.

The costs have mounted daily as government agencies at all levels have been forced to devote public funds to respond to actions taken by Trump and his supporters, according to a Washington Post review of local, state and federal spending records, as well as interviews with government officials. The expenditures include legal fees prompted by dozens of fruitless lawsuits, enhanced security in response to death threats against poll workers, and costly repairs needed after the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. That attack triggered the expensive massing of thousands of National Guard troops on the streets of Washington amid fears of additional extremist violence.

Although more than $480 million of the total is attributable to the military’s estimated expenses for the troop deployment through mid-March, the financial impact of the president’s refusal to concede the election is probably much higher than what has been documented thus far, and the true costs may never be known.

Many officials contacted by The Post said they were still trying to tally the cost of rapidly scaling up security to deal with the increased threat of violence from Trump supporters. Others have given up on trying to calculate their costs — perplexed over how to calculate the financial impact of a president’s injecting so much instability into the democratic system — opting instead to simply absorb them as the cost of doing business in the Trump era.

Costs identified by The Washington Post related to election misinformation

Some officials have shifted their attention to making plans for additional security measures going forward in the threatening environment fostered by Trump’s conspiratorial brand of politics.

“I think anytime you see an event like we saw on January 6th, it changes your perspective going forward. You don’t take things for granted like we used to,” said Michael Rapich, superintendent of the Utah Highway Patrol, which spent $227,000 on Jan. 17 to deploy 300 troopers to the state’s Capitol after threats of an armed siege by Trump supporters ahead of the inauguration of President Biden. “It is an incredible amount of money to spend.”

Other states spent even more, and officials are beginning to draft new security budgets that suggest ongoing security costs will grow significantly in the future as a result of the Capitol breach.

The bill to the federal government continues to grow daily, as thousands of National Guard troops patrol Washington and lawmakers consider a supplemental spending proposal to bolster their security.

The 25,000 troops that were deployed to Washington traveled on military planes and stayed in local hotels — their presence aimed at restoring order in the nation’s capital after an attempted insurrection that overwhelmed Capitol police and ended in five deaths. The cost estimate of the troops, first reported by Bloomberg News, covers the troop presence at the Capitol through mid-March, according to Defense Department officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal figures. With an unprecedented show of force that included checkpoints and militarized zones in Washington, the troops succeeded in thwarting efforts to disrupt Biden’s swearing-in, which took place on the same platform stormed by Trump-supporting rioters two weeks earlier.

Costs associated with Jan. 6 insurrection and after, including inauguration

It is not clear whether the House Democrats managing Trump’s impeachment trial plan to bring up the financial costs borne by taxpayers as a result of what critics have called his “big lie.” The trial begins Tuesday, and Democrats have focused heavily on Trump’s speech to supporters shortly before the Capitol riot.

A spokeswoman for Trump’s presidential office did not respond to a request for comment. Trump’s defense lawyers have argued that he was within his rights to publicly question the election’s integrity and should not be held responsible for the actions of people who attacked the Capitol after his speech.

Several states are working to calculate the taxpayer costs for additional security and related expenses in the aftermath of the November election and the Jan. 6 protests.

In California, state officials estimated they spent about $19 million, deploying 1,000 National Guard troops and hundreds of state troopers from Jan. 14 to Jan. 21 to protect the state Capitol and other locations.

“That’s a lot of money, even by California standards, for one week’s worth of work,” California Department of Finance spokesman H.D. Palmer said in an interview. “But it was necessary work to make sure that we didn’t see the damage that could have occurred, had we had a crowd that was bent on doing damage to the building.”

In Ohio, taxpayers spent $1.2 million to deploy National Guard troops to the closed Statehouse building in Columbus. The New Mexico legislature increased its appropriation for Capitol security during the 60-day session by almost 40 percent this month, handing taxpayers a bill of $1.5 million for personnel, equipment and other expenses, officials said.

Taxpayers paid to deploy helicopters to monitor potential demonstrations in Texas and North Carolina, temporary fencing around the capitols in Lansing, Mich., and Olympia, Wash., and extra security details for state lawmakers attending legislative sessions.

D.C. police dispatched 850 officers to help defend the Capitol, spending more than $8.8 million during the week of Jan. 6, acting police chief Robert J. Contee III said in his opening statement before a closed session of the House Appropriations Committee on Jan. 26. Contee said the final tab will probably be much higher, and police and prosecutors will be “engaged for years” investigating and trying the rioters.

“The costs for this insurrection — both human and monetary — will be steep,” he said. “The immediate fiscal impact is still being calculated.”

For many states, the post-Jan. 6 costs added to a tab that has been growing since shortly after polls closed on Nov. 3. Trump’s false assertion that night that he had won the election and that it was being stolen in ballot-processing centers led to credible threats against poll workers and facilities where they were working. Between added legal fees to fend off conspiracy-theory-laced lawsuits from Trump and enhanced security for election officials, states’ costs resulting from the president’s central fabrication about the Nov. 3 vote have escalated rapidly.

States spent untold millions of dollars on election recounts not required by law but demanded by Trump and legal and state legislative hearings.

Protesters, some armed, amassed at ballot-processing centers in places such as Maricopa County, Ariz.; Detroit; and Las Vegas in the days after Nov. 3, echoing Trump’s rhetoric about a rigged election.

The added bill comes as many states are resource-strapped as a result of a pandemic that has wracked the economy and decimated state budgets.

State costs associated with Jan. 6 and pre-inauguration-related security

Chris Loftis, communications director for the Washington State Patrol, said the new “staggeringly high” costs for security and other expenses constituted “a wasteful distraction of essential and diminishing resources.”

Not included in the more than $4 million estimated security bill for Washington state taxpayers is the yet-to-be-determined cost of fixing a gate at the governor’s mansion broken by armed demonstrators on Jan. 6.

“Not only have our people, places and processes of democracy been attacked and damaged, but the continuing expense of this new security environment will take away from funds that could have been used for covid vaccines and treatment” and other critical expenses, Loftis said.

In Georgia, which faced a large share of Trump’s post-election fraud charges, officials conducted two recounts of the presidential vote. One was triggered by Biden’s narrow margin of victory over Trump, leading to a hand recount of all 5 million presidential ballots cast — the largest hand recount in U.S. history. The Trump campaign then requested another recount — this time, a machine rescan of those hand-recounted ballots. Both recounts reaffirmed Biden’s victory. They also added extra costs for staff time and the security of election administrators, who faced growing threats and, in some cases, required 24-hour police details.

In Fulton County, Georgia’s largest, taxpayers spent an estimated $500,000 on security alone for election officials, who faced harassment and threats fueled by conspiracy theories over the November election.

Other state and local officials spent funds to battle with Trump’s well-funded team of lawyers in court. Trump and his allies devoted more than $11 million to a failed legal effort that included dozens of lawsuits and repeated losses in court due to a lack of evidence. After the Nov. 3 election and through the end of December, Trump and the Republican Party paid at least 65 firms or lawyers on election-related legal challenges, according to federal campaign finance filings.

Costs related to state legal challenges and security for election officials

In Georgia, separate figures for the Trump-requested recount were not available as of deadline.

The state of Pennsylvania hired several private law firms to deal with the onslaught of election litigation, paying outside lawyers as much as $480 per hour to fight Trump’s claims of rigged voting.

How much taxpayers ultimately had to spend to beat back Trump’s efforts to delay certification or overturn the results remains unknown, because many state officials did not specifically track their legal expenses.

“Although difficult to quantify, many legal hours were invested by the secretary of state’s general counsel and attorneys with the New Mexico attorney general’s office in responding to the baseless lawsuit filed by the Trump campaign,” said Alex Curtas, a spokesman for the New Mexico secretary of state.

Many officials said that while they wished the cost incurred as a result of Trump’s baseless voter-fraud allegations could have gone to more productive purposes, they saw the expenses as necessary to defending democracy.

“Safety isn’t cheap. Preparedness isn’t cheap,” Loftis said. “But neither are the lives of the elected leaders and support staff that we have been protecting, the historic and symbolic buildings they work in or the processes of democracy they represent.”

Congress is also grappling with calculating the expected costs of cleaning up and shoring up the Capitol after rioters carrying Trump flags and wearing MAGA hats smashed windows, busted doors, destroyed light fixtures and sprayed graffiti. The hours-long clash between law enforcement and insurrectionists left the building with battle scars that could take months to assess and repair, officials said.

“Statues, murals, historic benches and original shutters all suffered varying degrees of damage — primarily from pepper spray accretions and residue from tear gas and fire extinguishers — that will require cleaning and conservation,” according to an initial assessment of the damage by the office of the architect of the Capitol, which is responsible for preserving and maintaining the Capitol complex.

An official estimate for repair and cleanup costs is still being compiled, said Laura Condeluci, a spokeswoman for the office.

Congressional officials are also trying to determine the costs for securing the Capitol going forward. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) requested a third-party review of security protocols for lawmakers and said she expected Congress to put forward a supplemental spending bill specifically for beefing up security for lawmakers. The $515 million annual budget of the Capitol Police is funded through congressional appropriations.

The agency, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about how much the Jan. 6 riot cost, has placed many of its officers on 12-hour shifts and installed magnetometers and other additional security measures in recent weeks to deal with the increased threat of violence against lawmakers.

Acting Capitol Police chief Yogananda Pittman said in a Jan. 28 statement that “vast improvements” were needed for security in the future, including permanent fencing and backup forces in the vicinity of the Capitol complex.

The idea of creating a fence around the Capitol has received pushback from some congressional leaders and D.C. Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D), but it could ultimately be an expensive prospect if approved. The recent project to replace and upgrade the fencing around the White House complex, for example, cost about $64 million.

In the meantime, members of Congress are taking additional security measures on their own, ranging from bulletproof vests to private security details and surveillance cameras. Taxpayers are ultimately footing the bill, as lawmakers increasingly use their publicly funded Members’ Representational Allowances, known as “MRAs,” to protect themselves.

Pelosi has suggested that she wants the supplemental spending bill to cover much of those costs, so members can use the MRAs for their original purpose of serving constituents.

Pelosi has also encouraged lawmakers to attend post-traumatic counseling sessions organized in response to the riot. A spokesman for Pelosi did not respond to questions seeking the cost of the third-party security review, the counseling sessions or other ancillary expenses in the aftermath of Jan. 6.

Whatever their costs, those and other measures are expected to only grow over time as lawmakers deal with what the Department of Homeland Security recently described in a bulletin as a “heightened threat environment” in which domestic extremists may act on “perceived grievances fueled by false narratives.”

Robert McCrie, who teaches security management at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, compared the circumstances to the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, which led to a range of permanent security measures and expenses that have continued for almost 20 years.

“There’s no going back,” he said. “Our institutions have to be protected. They’re symbolic, but more than that, they are centers of government, of our sense of having a stable society. So those funds have to be spent.”

Federal investigators have also devoted considerable time and resources to identifying, finding and prosecuting rioters who breached the Capitol and threatened lawmakers; an officer also died after suffering injuries in the attack, and dozens of others were wounded.

U.S. authorities have opened case files on more than 400 potential suspects and obtained more than 500 grand jury subpoenas and search warrants in the sprawling investigation, acting U.S. attorney Michael R. Sherwin told reporters Jan. 26.

A nationwide manhunt has already resulted in 135 arrests and 150 federal criminally charged cases, according to Sherwin, the top prosecutor in D.C.

More charges could follow.

Law enforcement officials have estimated that roughly 800 people entered the Capitol without authorization, The Post reported last month.

The FBI and Justice Department declined to comment on the costs of the prosecutions and investigations, but some inside the bureau have described the Capitol riot case as their biggest since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Loftis, the Washington State Patrol spokesman, has said he has the full backing of his agency’s leadership to speak out.

“The selfish madness that caused this national self-inflicted wound must be addressed, as it has heaped tragedy on top of tragedy,” he said. “If those of us in law enforcement don’t speak up in defense of democracy and public safety, then our silence becomes a dreadfully powerful statement in its own right.”

7 March 2021

ON TUESDAY, DONALD TRUMP’S LAWYERS filed his final brief in support of his attempt to convince a federal appeals court that he is absolutely immune from prosecution for actions that he took during his term in office, including any criminal actions relating to the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol. The lies packed into this brief should carry sanctions for the attorneys whose names appear on the front page.

Before digging into the heap of falsehoods, let’s get this out of the way: Trump’s “I-was-a-king” immunity argument is utterly unconvincing. The Constitution says nothing about presidential immunity (unlike immunity for members of Congress), but the Supreme Court has reasonably held that presidents cannot be routinely sued or prosecuted for good-faith decisions made in office, so it has erected a balancing test to protect official presidential acts. In his opening brief filed on December 23, Trump argues there are five categories of protected official activity in Special Counsel Jack Smith’s case against him:

• his tweets about the outcome of the 2020 election “contending that the election was tainted by fraud and irregularities”;

• his communications “with the Acting Attorney General and officials at the U.S. Department of Justice about investigating election crimes and possibly appointing a new Acting Attorney General”;

• his communications “with state officials about the administration of the federal election,” in which he “urged them to exercise their official responsibilities in accordance with extensive information that the election was tainted by fraud and irregularities”;

• his communications “with the Vice President, in his legislative capacity as President of the Senate,” and attempts “to communicate with other members of Congress in order to urge them to exercise their official duties with respect to the certification of the federal election according to President Trump’s view of the national interest”; and

• the organization by “other individuals” of “slates of alternate electors from seven States to provide a justification for the Vice President to exercise his official duties in the manner urged by President Trump.”

Translation: Trump’s view of the Constitution and the law was the law, regardless of the truth.

Underlying all those activities is the Big Lie—the set of falsehoods that Trump repeated about the 2020 presidential election being stolen. The Big Lie was the factual foundation for everything that followed. It was the subject of the dozens of lawsuits that Trump filed and lost across the country in November and December 2020. It was because of the Big Lie that people died on January 6th. And it is because of the Big Lie that hundreds of Americans have been sentenced for crimes committed on that day.

But Trump knew that what he calls “fraud and irregularities” in the 2020 election did not exist. The House January 6th Committee spelled this out in detail in its final report, explaining exactly how Trump “was informed over and over again, by his senior appointees, campaign experts and those who had served him for years, that his election fraud allegations were nonsense.”

This is why Jack Smith’s indictment of Trump alleges that the five categories listed above were all part of a criminal scheme to obstruct the congressional counting of Electoral College votes and thwart a lawful election. Thus, the argument circles back to whether actions presidents take in furtherance of a crime against the United States, in theory, are insulated from accountability for presidents.

SO IT IS STUNNING TO SEE that, three years after January 6th, Trump and his lawyers are once again spreading the Big Lie. The brief filed on Tuesday contains the names of seven licensed attorneys from three law firms, including John Lauro and Todd Blanche, who have been publicly outspoken in the criminal cases on Trump’s behalf. Responding to Smith’s brief opposing Trump’s claims, his lawyers brazenly argue:

The government’s brief . . . omits the vigorous disputes and questions about the actual outcome of the 2020 Presidential election—disputes that date back to November 2020, continue to this day in our nation’s political discourse, and are based on extensive information about widespread fraud and irregularities in the 2020 election. [Emphasis added.]

The latter bit is patently false, and the lawyers move onto especially thin ice by citing as their source a Truth Social post that Donald Trump coordinated to release the same day their brief was filed. Both the brief and the Truth Social link to an anonymously authored PDF that rehashes many of the falsehoods that have been repeatedly disproved over the last three years.

This is sanctionable misconduct.

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Recall that in August 2021, a federal court in Michigan ordered monetary sanctions against Donald Trump’s “Kraken” lawyers for filing four frivolous lawsuits challenging the results of the 2020 presidential campaign. The judge concluded that the lawyers “deceiv[ed] a federal court and the American people into believing that rights were infringed, without regard to whether any laws or rights were in fact violated.” Rule 11 of the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure (not to mention ethical rules binding attorney conduct) states that when attorneys file a paper with a federal court, they are certifying “to the best of the person’s knowledge, information, and belief, formed after an inquiry reasonable under the circumstances,” that “the factual contentions have evidentiary support or, if specifically so identified, will likely have evidentiary support after a reasonable opportunity for further investigation or discovery.” It is well established that the Big Lie is a lie. The brief violates Rule 11.

Again, these falsehoods have been painstakingly and repeatedly debunked. As far back as December 2020, Attorney General Bill Bar announced that federal authorities uncovered no evidence of fraud that might have affected the outcome of the election. In the states of Ohio, Georgia, Nevada, Texas, and Arizona, Republican secretaries of states and official audits concluded there was no proof of widespread fraud. Fox News shelled out $787.5 million to Dominion Voting to settle a defamation case arising from the network’s knowingly broadcasting of false information about the 2020 election. The list goes on and on. For lawyers to assert in a filing to the D.C. Circuit—which is considered the second most powerful court in the land, behind the U.S. Supreme Court, because it hears the lion’s share of cases involving the federal government and the Constitution—is appalling.

It’s time for more lawyers—and not just their disturbed client—to be held accountable by the rule of law for continuing this damaging ruse.

Simply put, while you might be able to lie to the public in Georgia — or even lie to public officials on matters outside the scope of their duties — when you lie to state officials about important or meaningful facts in matters they directly oversee, you’re going to risk prosecution. That’s exactly what the indictment claims Trump and his confederates did, time and time again, throughout the election challenge.

The most striking example is detailed in Act 113 of the indictment, which charges Trump with making a series of false statements to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, and his deputies in Trump’s notorious Jan. 2, 2021, telephone call. Most legal commentators, myself included, focused on that call because it contained a not-so-veiled threat against Raffensperger and his counsel. In recorded comments, Trump told them they faced a “big risk” of criminal prosecution because he claimed they knew about election fraud and were taking no action to stop it.

Willis’s focus, by contrast, is not on the threats but rather on the lies. And when you read the list of Trump’s purported lies, they are absolutely incredible. His claims aren’t just false; they’re transparently, incandescently stupid. This was not a sophisticated effort to overturn the election. It was a shotgun blast of obvious falsehoods.

Here’s where the legal nuances get rather interesting. While Willis still has to prove intent — the statute prohibits “knowingly and willfully” falsifying material facts — the evidentiary challenge is simpler than in Smith’s federal case against Trump. To meet the requirements of federal law, Smith’s charges must connect any given Trump lie to a larger criminal scheme. Willis, by contrast, merely has to prove that Trump willfully lied about important facts to a government official about a matter in that official’s jurisdiction. That’s a vastly simpler case to make.

Yes, it is true that the individual lying allegations are also tied to much larger claims about a criminal conspiracy and a racketeering enterprise. But if I’m a prosecutor, I can build from that single, simple foundation: Trump lied, and those lies in and of themselves violated Georgia criminal law. Once you prove that simple case, you’ve laid the foundation for the larger racketeering claims that ratchet up Trump’s legal jeopardy. Compounding the danger to Trump, presidents don’t have the power to pardon state criminal convictions, and even Georgia’s governor doesn’t possess the direct authority to excuse Trump for his crimes.

(CNN) With Donald Trump’s presidency in the rear-view mirror, there’s a natural human tendency to sort of forget about what he did to the nation’s highest office. Let’s look to the future — and all that.

But it’s important to keep reminding ourselves of the various ways in which Trump sough to fundamentally undermine and redefine the presidency. Or put more simply: How incredibly abnormal the last four years were when compared to, well, every other modern presidency.

Which brings me to a new analysis from The Washington Post’s Fact Checker blog — breaking down the false and misleading claims made by both Trump and current President Joe Biden in their first 100 days in office.

The contrast is striking. Biden made 67 false or misleading claims in that period as compared to Trump’s 511, according to the Post’s tally. Which, if you do the math, means that Trump said more than seven times as many misleading or outright false things than Biden did during the critical first 100 days of each of their presidencies. SEVEN times!

“After four years of a presidency that swamped Americans with a gusher of false and misleading claims, the Joe Biden era has offered a return to a more typical pattern when it comes to a commander in chief and his relationship with the facts — one that features frequent spin and obfuscation or exaggeration, with the occasional canard,” concluded the Post’s Glenn Kessler, Adrian Blanco and Tyler Remmel.

Sit with that for a minute. And then consider this: Trump’s pace of mistruths — and outright lies — rapidly picked up as his term went on. His first 100 days was the most truthful period of time during his entire presidency.

As CNN’s Daniel Dale noted in a lookback piece of four years of fact-checking Trump:

“In 2017, Trump averaged 2.9 false claims per day. By 2018, it was 8.3 false claims per day. … Trump’s 2017 dishonesty tended to be impromptu ad-libbing. His 2018 dishonesty was much more scripted; he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in the midterm elections. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his 2019 Ukraine scandal. Then he used serial lying as a deliberate strategy in his response to the 2020 coronavirus pandemic — holding daily ‘briefings’ so wildly dishonest that CNN needed me to go on TV right afterward to debunk the nonsense viewers had just heard.”

And of course, none of that even takes into account the fact that Trump continues to propagate the Big Lie — that the 2020 election was fraudulent or stolen from him despite zero evidence of wrongdoing. (Even as I type, Arizona’s state Senate Republicans are conducting a “recount” of the ballots in Maricopa County that is baffling at best.) Polling suggests Republican voters prefer Trump’s falsehoods to the objective truth. A Quinnipiac University poll released in February showed 75% of self-identified Republicans agreeing with the statement that there was “widespread fraud in the 2020 election.”

Biden’s fact-check performance has returned the norm we expect from presidents and politicians: Truth-stretching and exaggerating in the main, with the occasional whopper thrown in but rarely repeated. The question is whether Trump’s pattern of dishonesty means that no matter what Biden does, we may never return to “normal.”

Trump may no longer be president — and he may never run for president again. But even if he decides to take a pass on running in 2024, Trump’s impact not just on politics but on our culture is massive — and nowhere is it bigger (or more problematic) than when it comes to his attempted erasure of truth and facts.