The day after Election Day in 2020, a large group of President Donald Trump’s supporters descended on Detroit’s Huntington Place convention center, at the time known as the TCF Center. They were trying to stop poll workers inside from counting ballots.

Police ultimately blocked many of the Trump supporters from entering the room where the poll workers were fulfilling their duties, but the crowd gathered outside the room, banging on its windows.

“Stop the count!” they chanted. “Stop the count!”

The protests that day were encouraged by operatives from the Trump campaign, which sought to prevent the president’s imminent election loss in Michigan by claiming that the vote count was fraudulent. According to court filings from special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into Trump’s election interference efforts in 2020, a campaign operative whose name was redacted “tried to sow confusion when the ongoing vote count at the TCF Center in Detroit Michigan looked unfavorable” to Trump’s chances.

When the unnamed campaign operative in the court filing — later identified by the Washington Post as Mike Roman — learned that there might be unrest at the TCF Center, he told a colleague present at the convention center: “Make them riot.”

The TCF protest was part of a broader effort by the Trump campaign to “create chaos, rather than seek clarity, at polling places where states were continuing to tabulate votes,” according to Smith’s filing.

Among the pro-Trump protesters at the TCF Center that day was a man named Daniel Gustafson, according to NBC News.

Five years later, Gustafson’s loyalty to Trump paid off.

He served as a public liaison on Trump’s inauguration committee, according to his LinkedIn profile, and, in January, landed a top job at the Interior Department. Gustafson is among a cohort of Michigan Republican activists who have received plum........

© The Intercept