Trump Charged in Efforts to Overturn 2020 Presidential Election Loss
The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States government and witness tampering.
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 peaceful transfer of power and keep him in office despite a decisive loss to Joe Biden.
Even in a year of legal reckonings for Trump, Tuesday's criminal case was stunning in its allegations that a former president assaulted the underpinnings of democracy in an ultimately failed effort to cling to power.
Federal prosecutors say Trump was "determined to remain in power" in conspiracies that targeted a "bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation's process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election."
Trump is due in court on Thursday before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
The Trump campaign responded with a statement, criticizing the Justice Department, calling the charges “un-American witch hunts.”
“This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2023 Presidential Election,” the Trump campaign statement said.
The criminal case comes while Trump leads the field of Republicans vying to capture their party's presidential nomination. It is sure to be dismissed by the former president and his supporters — and even some of his rivals — as just another politically motivated prosecution.
The charges focus on the two months after the November 2020 election in which Trump refused to accept his loss and spread lies that a victory was stolen from him. The turmoil resulted in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, when Trump loyalists broke into the building, attacked police officers and disrupted the congressional counting of electoral votes.
Between the election and the riot, Trump urged local election officials to undo voting results in their states, pressured former Vice President Mike Pence to halt the certification of electoral votes and falsely claimed that the election had been stolen — a notion repeatedly rejected by judges.
The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department had informed him that he was a target of its long-running January 6 investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the run-up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Trump on charges, including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding.
The mounting criminal cases against Trump are unfolding in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president.
The latest federal indictment against Trump focuses heavily on actions taken in Washington, and the trial will be held there, in a courthouse between the White House and the U.S. Capitol. No trial date has been set.
The investigation of Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election was led by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. His team of prosecutors has questioned senior Trump administration officials before a grand jury in Washington, including Pence and top lawyers from the Trump White House.
Rudy Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who pursued post-election legal challenges, spoke voluntarily to prosecutors as part of a proffer agreement, in which a person's statements can't be used against them in any future criminal case that is brought.
Prosecutors also interviewed election officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere who came under pressure from Trump and his associates to change voting results in states won by Biden, a Democrat.
Focal points of the Justice Department's election meddling investigation included the role played by some of Trump's lawyers, post-election fundraising, a chaotic December 2020 meeting at the White House in which some Trump aides discussed the possibility of seizing voting machines and the enlistment of fake electors to submit certificates to the National Archives and Congress falsely asserting that Trump, not Biden, had won their states' votes.
Trump has been trying to use the mounting legal troubles to his political advantage, claiming without evidence on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign.
The indictments have helped his campaign raise millions of dollars from supporters, though he raised less after the second indictment than he did after the first.
A fundraising committee backing Trump's candidacy began soliciting contributions just hours after the ex-president revealed he was the focus of the Justice Department's January 6 investigation, casting it as "just another vicious act of Election Interference on behalf of the Deep State to try and stop the Silent Majority from having a voice in your own country."
Attorney General Merrick Garland last year appointed Smith, an international war crimes prosecutor who also led the Justice Department's public corruption section, as special counsel to investigate efforts to undo the 2020 election and Trump's retention of hundreds of classified documents at his Palm Beach, Florida, home, Mar-a-Lago. Although Trump has derided him as "deranged" and suggested that he is politically motivated, Smith's past experience includes overseeing significant prosecutions against high-profile Democrats.
The Justice Department's investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election began well before Smith's appointment, proceeding alongside separate criminal probes into the January 6 rioters themselves.
More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the insurrection, including some with seditious conspiracy.