Former US president Donald Trump on Tuesday was indicted on felony charges for allegedly working to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The four-count indictment says that Trump sought to exploit protests at the US Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes.
The indictment has charges of conspiring to defraud the US, conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and violating a civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to violate rights that are guaranteed by the US constitution — in this case, the right to vote.
Photo: AFP
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” US Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith said. “It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government: The nation’s process of collecting counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
The Trump campaign for next year’s presidential election called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them.
Trump was the only person charged in Tuesday’s indictment, but prosecutors obliquely referenced a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results.
They also advanced plans to enlist electors in battleground states to claim that Trump had actually won them.
Trump is due in court today, the first step in a legal process that is to play out in a courthouse in Washington.
A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president, although Trump as president could theoretically appoint an attorney-general to dismiss the charges or potentially try to pardon himself.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who pursued post-election legal challenges, spoke voluntarily to prosecutors.
Giuliani was not named in the indictment, but appears to match the description of one of the co-conspirators.
A spokesman for Giuliani said that Trump had a “good-faith basis” for the actions he took.
Donald Trump’s attorney John Lauro called the indictment “an attack on free speech and political advocacy.”
Lauro said in an interview on CNN that it is “an effort to not only criminalize, but also to censor free speech.”
Trump was being told by people after the 2020 presidential election “that there were problems” with it and “he also saw in real time that the rules were changing without the state legislatures weighing in,” Lauro added.
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