Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges on Tuesday for attempting to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the US Capitol.
The Justice Department is investigating him for an unprecedented attempt to obstruct the peaceful transition of presidential power and endanger American democracy.
The four-count charge, Trump’s third criminal prosecution, provides additional insight into a dark period that has already been the focus of extensive federal investigations and riveting public hearings.
It traces a months-long campaign of lies about election results and claims that, even when those lies resulted in a chaotic insurgency at the Capitol, Trump sought to exploit the violence by citing it as a pretext to postpone the vote-counting that would have confirmed his defeat.
Even after a year of rapid-fire legal repercussions for Trump, Tuesday’s indictment, which included charges of conspiracy to deceive the United States government that he once commanded, was striking in its assertions that a former president violated the “bedrock function” of democracy.
It’s the first time the defeated president, who is the early favourite to win the Republican presidential nomination next year, has faced legal consequences for his frantic but ultimately futile attempt to cling to power.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, whose agency has been probing Trump for months.
“It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant aimed at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying presidential election results.”
The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them.
The only person charged in Tuesday’s indictment was Trump. However, prosecutors alluded to a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they claimed worked with Trump to overturn the election results. They also advocated dubious legal schemes to enlist slates of phony electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden in order to falsely claim that Trump had won them.
The indictment charges the vanquished president and his aides of attempting to “exploit the violence and chaos” by summoning parliamentarians late on Jan. 6 to postpone the recognition of Biden’s victory.
