A federal grand jury in Washington officially charged the former US President Donald Trump on Tuesday for using illegal means to come to power after his defeat in the 2020 election. This can have a major impact on his campaigns to regain his position in the White House in the 2024 election.
The four-count indictment was filed by Jack Smith, special counsel for the United States Justice Department, after Trump’s allies testified about the schemes he plotted to alter his defeat and ultimately fail to let Democrat Joe Biden become the US president in January 2021.
According to the 45-page document, Trump, 77, was involved in a conspiracy to defraud the United States, jeopardize the rights of others and impede an official proceeding before Congress- the counting of electoral votes attesting Biden’s victory – and block the Electoral College vote count by Congress on January 6, 2021, as 2,000 of his supporters broke into the US Capitol to protest.
For the first time in America’s 247-year history, a former president has been indicted for illegally attempting to retain office for another term rather than peacefully, even if skeptically, transfer power to a successor. Trump is expected to make his first appearance in court before a judge on Thursday.
Trump claims that he was cheated out of re-election by vote fraud among other election deviancy, even though several judges denied his claims in the weeks after the 2020 election.
The indictment says, “Despite having lost, the Defendant was determined to remain in power. So for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.” It adds, “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false.” It further said that Trump “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Each of Trump’s conspiracies “targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election”, according to the indictment.
It also states that Trump and six other people, whose names are not mentioned in the document, were involved in several conspiracies, to overturn the national outcome. Among the six, four of them were attorneys advising him, one was a Justice Department official and the other was a political consultant who “helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors [favoring Trump] to obstruct the certification proceeding” confirming Biden’s victory.
In the past two months, Smith has beaten Trump for the second time. In the previous 40-count indictment, Trump was accused of holding 32 highly classified national security documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida after leaving office and not returning them to the National Archives as per the US law. The trial will begin in May 2024.
A New York state prosecutor has accused Trump of forging financial records of his real estate conglomerate, the Trump Organization, to secretly pay $130,000 hush money to an adult film star prior to his 2016 presidential campaign. This was done to keep her quiet from revealing a one-night meeting with him. A trial is set for next March.
A prosecutor hailing from Georgia has also indicted Trump for illegally attempting to alter the 2020 election result in the state. In early 2021, a phone call was recorded in which Trump was asking election officials to “find” him 11,780 votes, to have more votes than Biden’s winning margin, so that he could have the state’s 16 electoral votes.
Trump refuses all allegations against him, often attacking Smith and the prosecutors in New York and Georgia.
Trump contradicted the indictment, arguing that it was “nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Justice Department” to hinder the 2024 election. He claimed the indictment to be similar to “Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.”
National polling indicates Trumps as the most favored by the Republican voters for the party’s 2024 presidential nomination. A poll published by New York Times showed Tuesday hours before the recent indictment in which Trump was in a tie with Biden at 43% each if both of them end up against each other for a second straight election.
