Washington DC [US], August 2 (ANI): Former United States President Donald Trump was indicted on Wednesday with one of the gravest charges a former President can face for his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 US Presidential polls.
Notably, the case filed on Tuesday by special counsel Jack Smith is the first attempt to hold Trump “criminally accountable” in a court of law for his actions between Election Day in 2020 and January 6, 2021.
The indictment, filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Donald Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States; a second to obstruct an official government proceeding, the certification of the Electoral College vote; and a third to deprive people of a civil right, the right to have their votes counted. Trump was also charged with a fourth count of obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding, as per the New York Times.
In the new charging documents, the prosecutors have said that Trump “was determined to remain in power” after losing the 2020 election and that he and six unindicted co-conspirators orchestrated a plot to overturn the results on and leading up to January 6, 2021, as per CNN.
Prosecutors have also detailed the “prolific lies” that Trump made in the wake of the 2020 election, including knowingly pushing false claims of voter fraud and voting machines switching votes, the indictment says, despite state and federal officials telling him the claims were wrong.
Trump “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won” the indictment states, adding that the “claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false.”
“But the defendant disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election,” CNN quoted the statement.
Meanwhile, Trump, who has derided Smith’s case as a politically motivated “fake indictment,” has been summoned to appear before a magistrate judge on Thursday.
Smith also made a rare public statement with the unsealing of the indictment, making clear that his team’s “investigation of individuals continues and emphasising that the Justice Department was committed to ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day.”
The indictment further alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators effectively tricked individuals from seven targeted states into creating and submitting certificates asserting they were legitimate electors.
The goal was to create a “fake controversy” at the certification proceeding in those states on December 14, 2020, and “position the Vice President – presiding on January 6 as President of the Senate – to supplant legitimate electors” with Trump’s fake ones, CNN reported citing the indictment.
The indictment alleges that Trump and co-conspirators “exploited” the “violence” and “chaos” of the Capitol attack – continuing efforts to convince members of Congress to delay the certification of the election that day while rebuffing pleas that he directed the rioters to depart.
In a phone call on the evening of the riot, the former President refused a request from his then-White House Counsel Pat Cipollone to withdraw his objections and allow for Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results, the prosecutors said in the new indictment.
They also pointed to Trump’s alleged repeated refusals to direct the rioters to depart from the Capitol. Trump did eventually tell the rioters to go home in a recorded video message released at 4:17 pm that day, CNN reported.
It also appears likely that the former president will press for a trial in the election subversion case to wait until after the 2024 election. In the meantime, Trump will continue his campaign schedule, including an appearance he has scheduled in Alabama on Friday, as per CNN.
A major takeaway of the indictment is that Trump is not the ‘sole accused’ in the matter, as along with him, six co-conspirators have also been listed without naming or indicting them.
Based on the descriptions provided of the co-conspirators, they match the profiles of a crew of outside lawyers and advisers that Trump turned to after his campaign and White House lawyers failed to turn up credible evidence of fraud and had lost dozens of cases to challenge the election results in swing states, New York Times reported.
Although, the indictment does not identify any of the six alleged co-conspirators who prosecutors say unlawfully agreed to aid Trump’s bid to subvert the election. But, according to Politico, five of them were readily identifiable based on the widely known details in the indictment.
“The co-accused are namely Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s lawyer and the leader of an effort to pressure state legislators to reverse election results; John Eastman, a constitutional lawyer who helped develop the strategy to pressure Mike Pence to overturn the election on January 6; Sidney Powell, a conservative lawyer who pushed fringe theories about manipulation of voting machines; Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department lawyer who pressed DOJ leaders to sow doubt about the election results; Ken Chesebro, an architect of key elements of Trump’s fake elector strategy. The identity of the sixth alleged co-conspirator, a political consultant, was not immediately verifiable, but the indictment says that person played a role in the effort to assemble false slates of pro-Trump presidential electors in states that Biden won,” Politico stated.
However, it remains unclear whether any or all of these co-conspirators will be indicted or whether they now have a period in which there’s an opportunity for them to decide to cooperate with prosecutors.
Some of the major revelations in the indictment that had never come to the fore, is the charge that Trump offered — and Jeffrey Clark accepted — the job of acting attorney general on January 3, 2021, Politico reported.
The select committee found phone records listing Clark as “acting attorney general” before Trump rescinded the appointment under the threat of mass resignations from DOJ leaders, but the committee did not confirm that Trump had made the official appointment.
Prosecutors also allege that Pat Philbin, Trump’s deputy White House counsel, warned Clark that if he and Trump pressed ahead with plans to stay in power past Biden’s scheduled inauguration, there would be “riots in the streets” across the country. According to the indictment, Clark responded, “That’s why we have an Insurrection Act”, Politico cited the indictment statement.
The indictment further revealed that Mike Pence kept contemporaneous notes, including of his conversations with Trump in the weeks leading up to January 6.
In one conversation from December 29, 2020, Trump falsely told Pence that the Justice Department had identified “major infractions” in election integrity, prosecutors say.
Another major takeaway of the indictment is that in the short term, the indictments so far appear to have had nothing but political upside for the former president, even though, it can’t be specified what effect that might have on his general election prospects, New York Times reported.
This was Trump’s third indictment since early April, and in the four months since his first indictment in New York, Trump has gained nearly 10 percentage points in national polling averages.
During that same period, his closest rival, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, has seen his support collapse to the point where he now lags Trump nationally by more than 30 percentage points and is far behind in all the early voting states, New York Times reported.
However, according to Politico, the indictment still missed several central details with the evidence amassed by the January 6 select committee, and large swaths of the committee’s probe went unmentioned.
“The indictment makes no reference to the organization of Trump’s January 6 rally or the financing that went into it. It omits evidence of Trump’s serious consideration of a plan to use federal or military power to seize voting machines from several states in which Trump disputed the outcome. It includes no allegations of any links between Trump and the extremist groups who attacked the Capitol or references to others featured by the January 6 committee as key players, like Roger Stone, Steve Bannon and Alex Jones,” Politico stated. (ANI)
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