Donald Trump charged with bid to overturn 2020 US presidential election

Washington: Donald Trump perpetrated a conspiracy to defraud the US with his effort to subvert the presidential election results in 2020, a conspiracy to obstruct and impede the January 6 Congress proceeding to verify the presidential election outcome, and a conspiracy against the right of citizens to vote and have their votes counted, a new indictment against the former president has charged.

On Tuesday, Jack Smith, a special counsel of the Department of Justice (DOJ), filed the indictment in a federal district court in Washington DC, making it the third indictment that Trump faces, even as the former president has emerged as the clear front-runner to become the Republican nominee for president in 2024. Trump has already been charged for paying hush money to an adult film actress in violation of campaign finance laws in New York, and for mishandling classified files in violation of the Espionage Act in Florida.

The latest indictment offers a detailed outline of Trump’s actions from November 2020 to January 2021, and accuses him of deliberately spreading “lies” that there was an “outcome-determinative fraud” in the presidential elections. While conceding his right to knowingly spread false claims and seek legal recourse, the indictment says that the conspiracies Trump engaged in “targeted a bedrock function” of the US federal government: “the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election”.

Trump immediately rejected the allegation and instead claimed there was a political witch-hunt against him. In a statement posted on Truth Social, Trump’s preferred social media platform, the former president’s campaign termed the indictment as the “latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden crime family and their weaponised Department of Justice” to interfere with the 2024 election. The campaign called it “election interference”, and compared the “persecution” of Trump to what happened in Nazi Germany, Soviet Union and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes.

Elaborating on its first charge, the indictment says that Trump did “knowingly combine, conspire, confederate, and agree with co-conspirators…to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted and certified by the federal government”. The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate election results by using knowingly false claims of election fraud.

The indictment then goes on to explain the different steps Trump took to perpetrate this conspiracy in the complex American electoral system, where voters, through a majority of the popular vote, select a set of electors in each state who then constitute the electoral college that elects the president.

Trump pushed state legislators and election officials to “ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors” in his favour. In particular, Trump and his team organised a “fraudulent set of electors” in seven states — Arizona, New Mexico, Nevada, Georgia, Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania. They then transmitted these false certificates to vice-president (VP) and other federal officials to be counted at the certification proceeding on January 6.

Trump also used the DOJ to “conduct sham election investigations” and sought to use the department to “falsely present the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors”, the indictment says. Trump then sought to enlist VP Mike Pence to use his ceremonial role at the January 6 certification proceeding to alter the election results, by either unilaterally rejecting the valid electors from the seven states and use the fraudulent electors, or send back the list of electors to the state legislators for review.

When that failed, Trump repeated “knowingly false claims of election fraud” to supporters on January 6 and told them that the VP had the authority to alter results. This was the crowd that attacked the US Capitol on the day. “As violence ensued, the defendant and his co-conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification”.

At each stage, many around Trump told him that his efforts were either unconstitutional or will not work and refused to accept his demands. Among those who cautioned him were VP Pence, senior DOJ officials, director of the office of national intelligence, department of homeland security officials, senior White House attorneys, senior Trump campaign staffers, state legislators and officials, and state and federal courts which rejected Trump’s legal appeals.

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