WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump was charged Tuesday with felonies for working cancel the results of the 2020 election as the election approaches violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department moving to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.
THE four-count indictment, the third criminal case against Trump, provided deeper insight into a dark moment that has already been the subject of exhaustive federal investigations and gripping public hearings. It chronicles a months-long campaign of lies about the election results and claims that, even when those lies culminated in a chaotic insurrection at the Capitol, Trump sought to exploit the violence by invoking it as a reason to further delay the count voices. which sealed his defeat.
Even in a year of rapid legal trials for Trump, Tuesday’s indictment, with charges including conspiracy to defraud the U.S. government he once led, was stunning in its allegations that a former president had attacked the “fundamental function” of democracy. It’s the first time the defeated president, who is the favorite for the Republican nomination in next year’s presidential election, has faced legal consequences for his frantic, but ultimately unsuccessful, efforts to hold on in power.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021 was an unprecedented attack on the seat of American democracy,” said Jack Smith, special advisor to the Department of Justice, whose office spent months investigating Trump. “This was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant intended to obstruct a fundamental function of the United States government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
The Trump campaign called the accusations “false” and questioned why it took two and a half years to make them.
Trump was the only person charged in Tuesday’s indictment. But prosecutors indirectly referred to a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside the government who they said worked with Trump to overturn the election results. They also highlighted legally dubious plans to enlist slates of fake voters in battleground states won by Democrats. Joe Biden falsely claiming that Trump actually won them.
The indictment accuses the defeated president and his allies of trying to “exploit the violence and chaos” by summoning lawmakers on the evening of Jan. 6 to delay the certification of Biden’s victory.
It also cites handwritten notes from the former vice president Mike Pence which lend weight to Trump’s incessant incitements to reject electoral votes. Pence, who is challenging Trump for the Republican Party presidential nomination, declined offers from a House panel that investigated the insurrection and sought to avoid testifying before the special prosecutor. He appeared only after losing a court fight, with prosecutors learning that Trump, during a conversation, had ridiculed him as being “too honest” to stop the certification.
Trump is scheduled to appear in court Thursday, the first step in a legal process that will take place in a courthouse between the White House he once controlled and the Capitol his supporters once stormed. The case is already dismissed by the former president and his supporters – and even by some of his rivals – as just another politically motivated prosecution.
Yet this case stems from one of the most serious threats to American democracy in modern history.
The indictment focuses on the turbulent two months following the November 2020 election, during which Trump refused to accept his loss and spread lies that the victory was stolen from him. The unrest resulted in riot at the Capitolwhen Trump loyalists broke into the building, attacked police officers and disrupted the congressional electoral vote count.
Between the elections and the riots, Trump urged local election officials to overturn voting results in their states, pressured Pence to stop the certification of electoral votes and falsely claimed the election was stolen — a notion repeatedly rejected by the justices. Among those lies, prosecutors say, were claims that more than 10,000 dead voters cast ballots in Georgia as well as tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada. Each claim has been refuted by the courts or by state or federal officials, the indictment says.
Prosecutors say Trump knew his claims that he had won the election were false, but he “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of distrust and anger and to erode public confidence in the administration of elections. »
The document carefully lays out the arguments Trump made in defense of his conduct, that he had every right to challenge the results, go to court, and even lie about it in the process. But in great detail, the indictment describes how the former president instead took criminal steps to overturn the clear verdict handed down by the voters.
The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department had informed him that he was the target of its investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the beginnings of the Capitol riot also recommended suing Trump on charges including complicity in an insurrection and obstruction of an official proceeding.
The indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of an official proceeding, and violation of a civil rights law of the post-Civil War Reconstruction era that made it a crime to conspire to violate constitutionally guaranteed rights. — in this case, the right to vote.
Criminal cases are multiplying in the heat of 2024. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from running for the White House or serving as president, even if Trump, as president, could theoretically appoint an attorney general to dismiss the charges or potentially attempt to pardon himself.
At New York, state prosecutors indicted Trump with the falsification of business records regarding a hush money payment to a porn actor before the 2016 election. The trial is expected to begin in March.
In Florida, the Justice Department brought in more than three dozen people crime matters, accusing him of illegally possessing classified documents after leaving the White House and hiding them from investigators. This trial begins in May.
Georgia prosecutors are also investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his election loss to Biden. The Fulton County Prosecutor is expected to announce charging decisions within a few weeks.
Smith’s team cast a wide net in its federal investigation, interviewing senior Trump administration officials, including Pence, before a grand jury in Washington. Prosecutors also questioned election officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and other battleground states won by Biden, which were pressured by the Trump team to change the voting results.
Rudy Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who filed lawsuits after the election, spoke voluntarily to prosecutors. Giuliani is not named in the indictment, but appears to fit the description of one of the co-conspirators. A spokesperson for Giuliani said Tuesday evening that Trump had a “good faith basis” for the actions he took.
Attorney General Merrick Garland Last year, he named Smith, an international war crimes prosecutor who also headed the Justice Department’s public corruption section, as special counsel to investigate efforts to overturn the election as well as on Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida home at Mar-a-Lago. Although Trump has called him “deranged” and called him politically motivated, Smith’s past experience includes overseeing major prosecutions of prominent Democrats.
The Justice Department’s investigations began well before Smith’s appointment, alongside separate criminal investigations into the rioters themselves. More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the insurrection, including some for seditious conspiracy.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Zeke Miller, Lindsay Whitehurst, Nomaan Merchant, Lisa Mascaro and Mary Clare Jalonick in Washington, Jill Colvin in New York, Meg Kinnard in Columbia, South Carolina, Alanna Durkin Richer in Boston, Nick Riccardi in Denver, Kate Brumback in Atlanta and Claudia Lauer in Bensalem, Pa., contributed to this report.
