The most serious legal threat to the former president yet as he campaigns to win re-election came with the indictment of Donald Trump on Tuesday for his attempts to invalidate the results of the 2020 election.
The 77-year-old Trump has been charged with three counts of conspiracy and one count of obstruction in this, his third criminal indictment since March.
Trump, the front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, is already scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May of next year for allegedly handling top-secret government documents.
At the height of what is anticipated to be a contentious and divisive presidential campaign, the new charges increase the possibility that Trump will become involved in additional legal proceedings.
The joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, which was held to certify Democrat Joe Biden’s election victory, is the official proceeding that is the subject of the charges brought against Trump by special counsel Jack Smith.
In the 45-page indictment issued by a grand jury in Washington, Trump is also charged with attempting to suppress American voters by claiming falsely that he won the November 2020 presidential election.
“The Defendant launched his criminal scheme shortly after election day,” which fell on November 3, 2020, according to the indictment.
It stated that the conspiracy’s goal was to use willfully false allegations of election fraud to challenge the validity of the results of the 2020 presidential election.
The attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters on January 6 was “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” according to Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at the Hague.”
Smith made a brief statement to the press, saying, “It was fueled by lies.”
The nation’s process for gathering, tallying, and certifying the presidential election results was the target of lies by the defendant with the intention of impeding it.
In light of Trump’s historic indictment, the White House remained silent.
Biden, who will run for reelection in 2018 and has previously referred to Trump as a “threat” to the country, continued his beach vacation in Delaware and had dinner with First Lady Jill Biden before watching “Oppenheimer.”
Trump is the only defendant named in the indictment, which lists six alleged co-conspirators but does not name any of them.
The indictment stated that the defendant and his accomplices “used knowingly false allegations of election fraud to persuade state legislators and election officials to tamper with the results of the legitimate election.”
Smith stated he would push for a “speedy trial” when Trump is scheduled to be arraigned in court on August 3.”
Judge Tanya Chutkan, a choice of former Democratic President Barack Obama for the US District Court, is anticipated to preside over the case.
Trump was charged with being “determined to remain in power” despite having lost the election.”
Accordingly, the defendant “spread lies for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” according to the statement.
“The Defendant knew that these claims were false, and they were false.”
Smith received a barrage of insults from Trump, who referred to him as “deranged” and charged that he had issued “yet another Fake Indictment” in an effort to “interfere with the presidential election.”
In a post on his Truth Social platform, Trump questioned, “Why didn’t they do this 2.5 years ago?”. Why were they so patient?
They wanted to place it in the exact middle of my campaign, he explained. It is “Prosecutorial misconduct!”.
Trump has repeatedly criticized the investigation, calling it a political “witch hunt” by the Justice Department.
In addition to the charges regarding the classified documents, the former president will stand trial in New York for allegedly paying a porn star hush money on election night.
Prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating whether Trump made an unauthorized attempt to rig the results of the state’s 2020 elections.
In a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger on January 2, 2021, Trump pressed the official to “find” 11,780 votes that would overturn his loss to Biden in the state, which sparked the investigation.
Trump was impeached while president for seeking political information on Biden from Ukraine and for the events of January 6, but he was both times cleared by the Republican-majority Senate.
