The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States government and witness tampering.
The indictment, marking the third criminal case against the former president as he seeks to return to the White House in 2024, follows a lengthy federal investigation into efforts by Trump and his allies to subvert the peaceful transfer of power and maintain it. in office despite a decisive loss to Joe Biden.
Even in a year of legal trouble in rapid succession for Trump, the criminal case filed Tuesday was particularly shocking over allegations that a former president lashed out at the foundations of democracy in a desperate, and eventually failed, attempt to cling to power.
Federal prosecutors claim that Donald Trump was “determined to remain in power” in conspiracies that attacked a “fundamental function of the United States federal government: The national process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
Trump is scheduled to appear Thursday before federal judge Tanya Chutkan.
The criminal case comes as Trump leads the intra-GOP race for the presidential nomination. No doubt the president and his supporters, and even some of his rivals, will downplay the new indictment as just another political prosecution. Yet the charges stem from one of the most serious threats to American democracy in modern history.
The charges focus on the turbulent two months after the 2020 election in which Trump refused to concede defeat and spread lies that his victory was stolen. The chaos resulted in the attack on the federal Capitol on January 6, 2021, when Trump supporters stormed the compound, attacked police officers and disrupted the legislative collegiate vote count.
In the period between the election and the riot, Trump urged local election officials to reverse the results of the vote in their states, pressured Vice President Mike Pence to suspend the certification of Electoral College votes, and falsely claimed that the election had been stolen, a notion that the judges repeatedly rejected.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Zeke Miller, Lindsay Whitehurst and Michael Kunzelman in Washington contributed to this report.
FOUNTAIN: Associated Press
