Washington: As he runs for president again next year, Donald Trump was charged with a crime for the third time in four months on Tuesday. This time, the charges stem from attempts to rescind his loss in the 2020 US election.
According to the four-count indictment, Trump conspired to deny voters their right to a fair election and defraud the US by obstructing Congress's efforts to certify President Joe Biden's victory.
Trump was instructed to make his initial court appearance on Thursday.
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The accusations stem from Special Counsel Jack Smith's investigation into claims that Trump, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, attempted to reverse his defeat to Biden, his Democratic opponent.
According to the indictment, Trump and six other unidentified people planned to tamper with the results. Trump repeated his claims that the election was rigged despite knowing they were untrue, according to the prosecution, in order to "create a national atmosphere of intense mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election."
The Trump campaign claimed in a statement that he has always complied with the law and described the indictment as a political "persecution" akin to that of Nazi Germany.
According to testimony from officials, Trump put pressure on them based on untrue allegations of widespread voting fraud. On January 6, 2021, his supporters attacked the US Capitol in an effort to prevent Congress from recognising Biden's victory.
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In seven states, all of which he lost, the indictment claimed that Trump and his accomplices organised fictitious slates of electors to submit their votes for counting and certification as official by Congress on January 6.
The co-conspirators were not identified, but one of them seemed to be former Justice Department employee Jeffrey Clark, the former head of the civil division who attempted to become attorney general in order to begin investigations into voter fraud in Georgia and other key battleground states. A request for comment from Clark did not immediately receive a response.
Attorney John Eastman, who falsely asserted that Vice President Mike Pence might object to the certification of the election results, was another alleged co-conspirator. In the course of the investigation last year, the phones of Eastman and Clark were both seized and searched.
Trump was already the first former US president to be charged with a crime. He has made an effort to paint the prosecutions as being part of a political witch hunt.
These represent Smith's second round of federal accusations since US Attorney General Merrick Garland named him a special counsel in November.
Trump was indicted on 37 counts by a federal grand jury in Miami that was called by the special counsel in June for obstruction of justice and unlawful retention of classified government documents after he left office in 2021. Trump entered a not guilty plea. He was charged with putting some of the most important US national security secrets at risk.
40 criminal counts were added last Thursday by the prosecution against Trump, accusing him of ordering staff members to delete security videos while he was being investigated for keeping the records.
Trump was indicted by a grand jury called by the district attorney of Manhattan in March, which marked the beginning of the legal proceedings against him. In April, Trump entered a not guilty plea to 34 felony counts accusing him of fabricating financial records relating to a payment to porn star Stormy Daniels to buy her silence before the 2016 election regarding an alleged sexual encounter with him. Trump has refuted the meeting.
As he seeks a rematch with Biden, 80, Trump, 77, leads a crowded field of Republican presidential candidates. In April, Biden started his reelection campaign.
Trump, who held office from 2017 to 2021, has demonstrated the ability to withstand legal issues, political controversies, and behaviour on the personal front that might bring down other politicians. Republican voters and elected officials have backed Trump, claiming that the accusations against him are politically motivated and that they are the result of selective prosecution.
Strategists claimed that while the indictments might aid Trump in securing support from his core supporters and winning the Republican nomination, his ability to take advantage of them in the general election the following year, when he will need to win over more sceptical moderate Republicans and independents, may be more constrained.
His legal problems are getting worse in the interim. In addition to the three indictments, Trump is also the subject of a fourth criminal investigation by a Georgia county prosecutor into claims that he attempted to rig the state's 2020 election.
DOCUMENTS CASE
Prosecutors charged him with mishandling sensitive classified documents in the documents case, including those pertaining to the US nuclear programme and possible domestic attack vulnerabilities.
Trump allegedly asked his lawyers if they could mislead the government about the existence of the records when the Justice Department tried to get him to return the records, according to the indictment. In order to keep boxes containing documents from being discovered, he is accused of working with his assistant Walt Nauta—who is also charged—to move the boxes around inside his home at the Mar-a-Lago resort in Florida. Nauta has also entered a not guilty plea.
Carlos De Oliveira, a second employee who works in maintenance at Mar-a-Lago, was charged on Thursday with conspiring to obstruct justice and is suspected of assisting Trump in concealing documents.
Trump must pay $5 million in damages for sexually assaulting former Elle magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in the 1990s and then defaming her by calling her a liar, according to a jury's verdict in a civil lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan in May.
Despite the fact that he was not charged personally in that case, his real estate company was found guilty of tax fraud in Manhattan in 2022.
Sometimes politically sensitive cases require the appointment of special counsels, who work independently of the leadership of the Justice Department.
Smith had previously led the Justice Department's public integrity division, served as the special court in The Hague's chief prosecutor, and been a federal and state prosecutor in New York before being chosen by Garland to take charge of the two Trump-related investigations.
CAPITOL ATTACK
Trump's supporters attacked police and broke into the Capitol on January 6, 2021, using a variety of weapons, including chemical sprays and riot shields, forcing lawmakers to flee for their lives. During and shortly after the commotion, five people died, and 140 police officers were hurt. In a fiery speech before the attack, Trump urged his supporters to march to the Capitol and "fight like hell" to "stop the steal" of the election.
More than 1,000 people have been accused of crimes connected to the riot, some of whom have already been found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
Trump and his allies lost a number of lawsuits challenging the election results on the grounds of fabricated allegations of fraud. Trump persisted in spreading this false narrative as his presidency came to an end, disregarding advice from some of his White House advisors, former Attorney General William Barr, and other officials that there was no proof of widespread fraud.
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Trump "corruptly pressured" former Vice President Mike Pence to decline to count the state-by-state electoral votes that determine an election's outcome during a joint session of Congress, according to a 2022 investigation report by a Democratic-led US House of Representatives committee.
The committee claimed that as part of that alleged scheme, Trump and several of his advisers oversaw a plot to have electors in crucial states where Trump lost, like Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, New Mexico, and Pennsylvania, submit false paperwork to Congress and the US National Archives and Records Administration claiming that he had actually won those states.
