Indictment Mk III

[edschweppe]

Former President Donald Trump was indicted - again - this afternoon, this time on four counts relating to his attempts to overturn the 2020 Presidential election and block the transfer of power:

WASHINGTON (AP) — Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges Tuesday for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department moving to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power.

The four-count indictment reveals new details about a dark chapter in American history that has already been the subject of exhaustive federal investigations and captivating public hearings. It cites handwritten notes from former Vice President Mike Pence about Trump's relentless goading to reject the counting of electoral votes. And it accuses Trump and his allies of exploiting the disruption caused by his supporters' attack on the Capitol to redouble their efforts to spread false claims of election fraud and persuade members of Congress to further delay the certification of Joe Biden's victory.

Even in a year of rapid-succession legal reckonings for Trump, Tuesday's criminal case, with charges including conspiring to defraud the United States government that he once led, was especially stunning in its allegations that a former president assaulted the underpinnings of democracy in a frantic but ultimately failed effort 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 special counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. "It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation's process of collecting counting and certifying the results of the presidential election."

Trump's claims of having won the election, said the indictment, were "false, and the Defendant knew they were false. But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election."

The indictment, the third criminal case brought against the former president as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024, follows a long-running federal investigation into schemes by Trump and his allies to subvert the transfer of power and keep him in office despite a decisive loss to Biden.

Trump is due in court Thursday before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, the first step in a legal process that will play out in a courthouse in between the White House he once controlled and the Capitol his supporters once stormed.

This, of course, follows Trump's previous indictments: the federal one on deliberately mishandling classified information (back in June), and the New York state one on fraudulent business record keeping (back in March).