Some court submissions require “verified complaints” or affidavits in support of a motion, meaning that the information contained within has been verified by the plaintiff filing the suit or the attorney filing the motion. The verification may be near meaningless to the suit, or it can mean everything, depending on the type of filing. In either case, the submission better damn well be accurate, whether it’s a critical document or a motion for an extension. Perjury applies if a person lies. It is very difficult to tell from Axios’s reporting what kind of affidavit Trump signed, but it’s now clear that Trump signed a document attesting to information from Georgia that he knew wasn’t true. That’s bad. Always. ‘

From Axios:

A senior White House lawyer expressed concerns to President Trump’s advisers and attorneys about the president signing a sworn court statement verifying inaccurate evidence of voter fraud, according to emails from December 2020 obtained by Axios.

Why it matters: The emails shed new light on a federal judge’s explosive finding Wednesday that Trump knew specific instances of voter fraud in Georgia had been debunked, but continued to tout them both in public and under oath…

…In one email cited in Judge Carter’s opinion, Eastman told Trump’s team that the president had been made aware that some of the allegations and evidence of voter fraud used in a Georgia election lawsuit were inaccurate.

The signature relates to the ruling made regarding whether John Eastman’s emails to and from Trump would remain privileged under the attorney-client privilege. Judge David O. Carter (The subject of Trump’s unhinged diatribe yesterday) found that at least four of them were not privileged due to the “crime” exception to the hearsay rule. Hearsay will not prohibit the admission of evidence – in this case, emails – that were crafted not as legal advice but as part of a coordinated conspiracy.

Thus, Trump was signing court papers attesting to the veracity of what’s within the document when he knew it was wrong, his attorney knew the facts were wrong, and that truly “cooks Trump’s goose,” as John Dean just said on MSNBC.