More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.
This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him. Although other charges allege serious misconduct, this cuts to the gravest act he committed: his lengthy, concerted effort to subvert American democracy.
The grand jury handed up the indictment this afternoon, charging Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding, and conspiracy against rights.
The indictment, obtained by Special Counsel Jack Smith of the Department of Justice, doesn’t break open new storylines, though it does add detail. But the 45-page document brings together every aspect of the paperwork coup, from the origins of Trump’s attempt to stay in power just after the election up to the desperate last efforts on January 6.
Trump, aided by six specific co-conspirators, used several avenues, Smith alleges. They tried to get state governments to subvert the election results. They encouraged the creation and submission of fraudulent slates of electors. They attempted to weaponize the power of the Justice Department by standing up sham investigations. And they unsuccessfully pressured Vice President Mike Pence to exceed his powers and throw the certification of the election into turmoil. Although the charges don’t accuse Trump of criminal misconduct in inciting the mob that attacked the Capitol, it does say he “exploit[ed] the violence and chaos.”
Trump acknowledged the indictment in a statement, calling them “fake” and “election interference,” though without explicitly denying any of the charges. “These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House,” the statement said.
In the days after the election, Smith writes, Trump “spread lies” about the election being tainted by fraud. “These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false,” the indictment adds. Like any American, Smith notes, he had a right to spread these lies. But since none of it changed the outcome, Trump soon turned to steps that were not legal. Starting on November 13, 2020, “the Defendant and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function.”
Trump has suggested in recent days that he was relying on what he believed was good advice as he contested the election, but the indictment goes into detail to rebut that idea. Practically every aide in a position to know told Trump that the fraud claims were bunk and wouldn’t fly in court. He himself allegedly acknowledged in private that they sounded “crazy.”
A few advisers and lawyers, though, continued to push on the claims. Although the co-conspirators are not named in the indictment, details suggest that they include attorneys Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Justice Department official Jeffrey Clark. The co-conspirators, too, understood that they were playing with falsehoods and fire, the indictment claims. “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories,” Giuliani told Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers. When a top Trump adviser told Eastman that his legal proposal wouldn’t work but would “cause riots on the streets,” Eastman “responded that there had been points in the nation’s history when violence was necessary to protect the republic.”
Trump was blithe about the violence, too. In one striking juxtaposition, the indictment notes that he tweeted a broadside against Pence for refusing to participate in the plot at 2:24 p.m.—just one minute before Secret Service agents had to evacuate the vice president to protect him from a crowd calling him a traitor and calling for his lynching.
If the indictment lacks some of the drama and juicy details of the Smith’s previous indictment of Trump for mishandling classified documents, that is because so much has already been revealed, both by reporting and by the House committee investigating the election subversion attempt. But it is also because the facts themselves provide drama enough. Never before in history had the U.S. failed to conduct a peaceful transfer of power. Never before had a president committed such a grave offense against the nation he was elected to serve.
In a sense, it didn’t work: Trump left office 14 days after the riot, and he’s now charged with serious crimes for his behavior. In another sense, however, the country is still in danger. Trump is the leading Republican candidate for president in 2024, and he could return to the White House. One of his first acts would surely be to try to rid himself of the federal cases against him; he has already indicated he’d then move on to eliminating the guardrails that prevented him from succeeding on January 6 and have sought to hold him accountable since. The judgment of the entire American electorate will be more important than what any grand or petit jury can deliver.