Trump, indicted for his attempts to reverse the result of the 2020 elections

The era of Donald Trump has entered unexplored territory this Tuesday, one more, with the indictment of the former Republican president by a grand jury in Washington, which has investigated his attempts to reverse, supported by alleged fraud, the legitimate results of the November 2020 elections, culminating in the assault on the Capitol on January 6, 2021 by a horde of supporters. The Republican candidate must appear in a federal court in Washington this Thursday at four in the afternoon for the reading of the charges.

This is his third indictment, following the April arrests in New York at the stormy daniels case that investigates the payment of black money to silence a porn actress for an extramarital relationship, and the one in June in Miami, where he appeared before the judge to answer about the handling of hundreds of boxes of confidential documents that he took without permission from the White House, when he reluctantly left office. He kept them in his Mar-a-Lago mansion, despite repeated claims by the authorities. At least 31 of those classified documents concern national security.

But the seriousness of the facts that are imputed to him, in a year of legal turmoil for Trump, even exceeds the two previous accusations. Nothing less than assaulting the foundations of democracy, in the institution that represents it, in a maddened and ultimately failed effort to cling to power. The Republican’s bad losing blinded him to the point of conspiring to defraud the United States government he once led, repeatedly lying about the election results, ignoring the repeated prodding of some aides to tell the truth, but while conspiring with others to try to fraudulently shift votes in their favor. On the day of the coup, in short, he tried to “exploit” the chaos by pressing to delay the certification of the election results.

If in the case opened against him in Florida he is accused of 37 crimes, this time Donald Trump has conceded four charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official procedure, witness tampering and conspiracy against the rights of citizens. The investigation was commissioned by the Justice Department to Jack Smith, a special prosecutor who is also handling the case of the confidential papers.

Trump’s claims to have won the election, the prosecution says, were “false, and the defendant knew they were false. But the defendant repeated them and disseminated them widely anyway – to make his knowingly false claims about him appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the elections. ”. A conclusion similar to that reached by the special committee of Congress, made up of legislators from both parties, who investigated him for the assault on the Capitol, agreeing that with his attitude Trump put the country on the brink of a coup.

In the investigation, and the grand jury convened by him, Smith have focused on Trump’s actions during the 67 days between the election that gave Joe Biden the victory, and on January 6, 2021, when he summoned thousands of his supporters to a rally in Washington ―“Be there. It will be wild! ”, He exhorted them on Twitter. He also told them to fight “like hell.” What happened next is part of the history of the infamy of American democracy: some 2,500 of his followers stormed the Capitol, where that day Biden’s electoral victory was being certified in a joint session of Congress and the Senate, a process that It had always developed peacefully, and this time it was led by Vice President Mike Pence, whom his boss unsuccessfully tried to pressure him not to accept the Democratic victory, despite the fact that it was not in his power to do so. The mob advanced towards Parliament shouting “Let’s hang Mike Pence!”

Five people died that day and more than 150 policemen were injured. A federal court in Washington has since carried the burden of prosecuting the participants, as part of the “largest legal case in the history of the Department of Justice,” as Attorney General Merrick Garland has defined it. There are already more than a thousand defendants and the case is far from being closed.

The congressional special committee had already investigated him for 18 months, work from which the Washington grand jury has particularly benefited. They interviewed a thousand witnesses and examined some 100,000 documents. The conclusions were presented in a series of hearings televised from the Capitol. The fruit of that labor was an 814-page report that concluded with the unanimous recommendation that Trump not be allowed to run for public office again, and that he be tried for four counts: inciting an insurrection, conspiring to issue a perjury and to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official congressional proceeding.

The indictment of Trump, who was subjected a few days after January 6 to a impeachment, the second political trial of his presidency, has been made to wait 32 months. The defendant himself noted this last week, when he linked the fact that more than two years have passed and that the accusation comes precisely now with the certainty that he easily leads the polls to be chosen as the Republican candidate for the presidential elections. of 2024. It is proof, he maintains, that so much accusation is the way in which the Biden Administration is trying to push out of the race the most difficult rival for the president, who aspires to revalidation next year.

“Witch hunt”

Trump speaks of a “witch hunt” and “electoral interference”, while using a messianic tone when telling his supporters that in reality the “political instrumentalization” of institutions such as the FBI or the Department of Justice has as its ultimate objective his voters, and that he only limits himself to stand between them and their inquisitors. “I have heard that Jack Smith degenerate, in order to interfere in the 2024 election, will file an indictment fake against your favorite president, me ”, he published this Tuesday on social networks. “Why didn’t he do it 2.5 years ago? Why has he waited so long? Because they want to do it in the middle of my campaign, ”he added. The certain thing is that all the legal problems that he has open will interfere in the campaign. The start date of the trial for the payment of Daniels is set for March 2024, two months after the primary process began in Iowa. Mar-a-Lago papers judge Aileen M. Cannon set the start of that process for May 20. It is not ruled out that both dates suffer changes, and that the former president’s lawyers, who tried to delay everything until after the elections, try to delay the times as much as possible.

As on previous occasions, the imminence of the indictment was aired by the former president himself on his Truth social network on July 18, when he said that he had received a letter from Smith notifying him that he was being investigated for the assault on the Capitol. Smith and the grand jury continued, despite the noise generated by Trump, with their investigations. They have been calling in people close to them for questioning up to the last minute, and on Monday CNN reported that they had received some 1,000 pages of documents that they had not yet had a chance to review. The news network also said that the investigation had been extended to a meeting that took place as early as February 2020 at the White House to implement the plan to discredit the elections that November, due to alleged irregularities in the voting machines. electoral recount and early voting, which was extended due to the pandemic.

Trump has another legal front pending, which could materialize, according to the prosecutor handling the case, Democrat Fani T. Willis, as soon as during the month of August. It is an investigation, in this case by a special grand jury, for the alleged maneuvers that she and her team carried out to manipulate the result of the 2020 elections in Georgia. The investigation began in February 2021 and has as one of its touchstones the call that Trump made to the attorney general of the southern state, Brad Raffensperger, to demand that he seek 11,780 votes, one more than the difference that Biden took from him in Georgia. A judge rejected a few days ago Trump’s claim to challenge the prosecutor in the case.

The Atlanta trial, which would mean his fourth indictment, differs from previous ones in that in this Trump could be accompanied on the bench by up to 20 people from his circle, who have received evidence that his prosecution is being studied. Among them are the usual suspects like Rudy Giuliani, attorney for the former president and former mayor of New York; Mark Meadows, his former chief of staff, or John Eastman, alleged legal mastermind behind his attempts to stay in power.

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