In an unprecedented moment in the history of the United States, a country that boasts the world’s longest-running democracy, former President Donald Trump will be held criminally accountable as the instigator of the attempt to annul the 2020 election result, which ended in failure. coup d’état on January 6, 2021. That day, after two months of illegal initiatives to annul the result of the polls, he encouraged hordes of fanatics to occupy the Capitol and prevent Congress from ratifying Joe Biden’s victory, violating the mandate of the Constitution and violating the tradition of the peaceful transition of the presidency.
This was concluded by special prosecutor Jack Smith, who on Tuesday managed to get the grand jury to support his statement of accusations, in which it is the third case in which the former president has been charged, something never seen in the United States. On this occasion in Specifically, the representative of the public prosecutor’s office charges Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, to obstruct official procedure, another attempted obstruction and a conspiracy against the rights of citizens. The story implies that the president knew that he had lost the elections and that he resorted to strategies, lies and conspiracies to alter the result and continue in the White House.
“Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment document underlines. “He spread the lies that he had won and that there was fraud. These claims were false and the defendant knew it. But he continued to spread them to make those falsehoods appear legitimate,” he insists. “The aim of all this was to annul the legitimate result of the elections,” he reiterates.
According to this version, Trump had the collaboration of six co-conspirators, without specifying names. From the explanation of each one (four lawyers, a person in charge of the Justice Department and a political consultant), the media deduced that among them were Rudi Giuliani, Sidney Powell, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clak, Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis.
The story makes it clear that the then president knew that he had lost the elections, as Vice President Mike Pence, those responsible for Justice, National Security or his own legal advisers and advisers told him. “Each of the conspiracies, based on the mistrust that the defendant created with destabilizing lies about electoral fraud, was directed against the base of the United States Government, that of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential elections,” he remarks. the imputation. He then pressured Vice President Mike Pence on January 6, 2021 not to ratify Joe Biden’s victory in the joint session of the two houses as president of the Senate. When Pence told him that he wouldn’t make it Trump, he replied: “You’re too honest.”
Anticipating the events, Trump made a post on his social network in which he anticipated what was coming. “I have heard that the ‘deranged’ Jack Smith, to interfere in the 2024 elections, is going to bring out another false accusation against your favorite president, at 5 pm (23 hours in Spain this Tuesday),” he predicted. “Why didn’t he do this two and a half years ago? Why has he waited so long? Because he wants to put this in the middle of my campaign. Fiscal misconduct,” he reiterated. Several experts immediately responded that, like any case, his also required investigation and that his schedule should not coincide with that of the public prosecutor’s office. He added: “Nation in decline.”
Without any historical embarrassment, Trump’s lawyers went so far as to issue a statement lamenting the accusation by comparing it “to Nazi Germany of the 1930s, the extinct Soviet Union and other authoritarian regimes.” This proclamation was appropriated by Trun on his social network.
Smith, in addition to his document, responded with a brief appearance. “The attack on our nation’s Capitol was an unprecedented assault on America’s pillar of democracy and was fueled by the defendant’s lies.” And he described the security forces that fought to protect that citadel as “heroes”. “They not only defended a building, they risked their lives to defend what we are as a country and a people.”
A string of charges already weighed on Trump. In total, 34 before a New York court for the alleged falsehood to hide the payment of a bribe ($130,000) to a porn star to keep him silent for a sexual relationship, which he denies, in the 2016 election campaign .
And prosecutor Smith has already filed another 40 charges against him in Miami for the alleged theft of highly secret documents, such as questions about nuclear weapons or a map with preparations for an Iran attack, all found in his mansion in Mar-a-Lago (Florida). , some in places as safe as toilets, as well as for violating the espionage law or attempting to destroy other papers and surveillance video or trying to block the action of justice.
Despite the seriousness of these charges and others that may come from Georgia for his request to “find 11,780 votes” to change the electoral result in that state, cases that could land him in jail for the rest of his life, the new initiative of Smith supposes to enter in a territory still of much greater seriousness. This indictment, for which he will appear in Washington on Thursday before Judge Tanya S. Chutkan, represents for the first time charging a president or former president with the most dangerous and elaborate attempt to destroy American democracy in the style of his friend Vladimir Putin.
We will have to see the impact at the political level. So far, all the accusations have had the effect of reinforcing Trump as the leader of the Republican hopefuls heading into the 2024 election. A poll this week underscores his 37% lead over his rival, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. This survey also indicates that more than half of conservatives believe that the former president committed crimes, but maintain his support.
This time it can be different. Pence, usually not given to charging his former friend, issued a harsh statement. “The accusations raised today serve as a reminder: no one who puts himself above the Constitution should be president of the United States. No person is more important than our country,” said the current candidate for the 2024 elections. “On January 6 (from 2021), former President Trump demanded that I choose between him and the Constitution. I chose the Constitution, as I always will,” he said.
The investigation, which began with reluctance from the FBI, has focused on the actions that Trump and his collaborators carried out from November 3, 2020, election day, until the unfortunate day of January 6, 2021, when they was on the verge of gigantic political disaster in this country.
In reality, Trump’s attempts to derail the electoral process began before the appointment with the polls, as highlighted by the conclusions of the bipartisan commission of the Lower House of Congress on January 6. Over and over again he repeated that he could only lose if the results were rigged.
The same election night, already at dawn on November 4, Trump appeared at the White House and declared himself the winner, despite the fact that a good part of the count was missing due to the enormous number of votes by mail that the pandemic caused.
As of November 7, 2020, when Biden’s victory was announced, his government intensified efforts to achieve judicial reversal of the results in several states. There were more than 60 claims and all, one by one, were overturned by judges, many of them appointed by Trump himself. The Supreme Court denied all the appeals raised by the still president, despite the conservative majority thanks to the three magistrates appointed by Trump.
In parallel, the “intimates” of the White House, with Rudy Giuliani leading the legal team, with the help of lawyer Sidney Powell, began to disseminate conspiracy theories, without any proof, about the transfer of votes carried out by the machines. in favor of Biden (there they appealed to the long hand of the late Hugo Chávez), on the mass participation of undocumented immigrants or those without the right to vote, dead citizens and even dogs.
From this material the theory of electoral theft was forged, despite the fact that William Barr, Secretary of the Department of Justice, publicly acknowledged that they had not found any major fraud, or anything like it. Barr was ousted, and then Trump also tried to oust the replacement and put in Jeffrey Clark, a gray official who wrote a letter lying about finding evidence of election corruption.
At the same time, the lawyer John Eastman hatched the plan, the final resource, so that Pence would refuse to comply with that protocol initiative established by the Constitution.
Pence announced to him prior to January 6 that legally he could only ratify Biden’s victory. This prompted Trump, who had called the protest under the slogan “it will be wild”, to lash out at Pence in his “peaceful and patriotic” speech that morning. He said that he had no guts. The vice president was about to fall into the clutches of the insurgents, who had erected a scaffold for the vice president’s head. They were yelling “where’s Mike Pence, hang him up.”
The capture of the Capitol had the objective of paralyzing the normal process, exhausting the deadlines and proceeding to replace the representatives elected by the citizens with others imposed by several states in which the Republican leader lost (Arizona, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Nevada and New Mexico) and whose legislative chambers were under conservative control.
“While violence ensued, the defendant and co-conspirators exploited the disruption of the process by redoubling their efforts to make false claims of voter fraud and convince members of Congress to defer certification,” the indictment reads.
In those hours of political destabilization, Trump dedicated himself to watching what was happening on television to enjoy the fervor that it aroused, without lifting a finger to send reinforcements to end the revolt. This document reveals for the first time that Pat Cipollone, White House legal counsel, pleaded with Trump, hours after the start of the assault, for him to reverse his objections to Biden’s victory. Trump refused.
The president dedicated himself to sending messages of support to the insurgents, telling them that they were “very special” and that he loved them”, as well as repeating that the anger was justified by electoral theft, which he had invented. Once Pence called for the deployment of the national guard and the situation was under control, the president asked everyone to go home, but to remember such a special day.
In this long investigation, numerous personalities have testified, from Mike Pence to Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, or those involved in the plot in which it was proposed to declare martial law and annul the Constitution.
Although far-right commentators consider January 6 a picnic, and Trump himself endorses it, at least 476 assailants have pleaded guilty to insurrection. Not a few have received sentences of several years in prison, even those who have gone to trial, and quite a few confessed that they went to Congress to answer “the president’s call.”
