Former US President Donald Trump was summoned to the federal court on August 3, he was charged on four counts, according to court documents.
According to the document, the grad jury resolved that the prosecution provided enough evidence to press the following charges: "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 document says that on the evening of January 6, 2021, Trump and his ‘co-conspirators’ "attempted to exploit the violence and chaos at the Capitol by calling lawmakers to convince them, based on knowingly false claims of election fraud, to delay the certification [of the voting result]."
Trump is to appear before the United States District Court for the District of Columbia on August 3 at 4:00 p.m. local time (11:00 p.m. Moscow time).
On January 6, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol Building in Washington DC to stop lawmakers from officially certifying the results of the November presidential election in a last-ditch attempt to prevent Democrat Joe Biden from becoming the new president. One protester was shot dead during the unrest. In addition, three others died, the causes of their deaths were qualified as medical emergencies. Another Capitol Police officer died after the clashes.
US Attorney General Merrick Garland said the judicial system has handed down more than 600 guilty verdicts in connection with these events.
Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on Tuesday in connection with his far-reaching efforts to overturn the 2020 election, part of a continuing federal investigation into Mr. Trump’s attempts to cling to power after losing the presidency to Joseph R. Biden Jr.
The indictment was filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington. It accuses Mr. Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States, a second to obstruct an official government proceeding and a third to deprive people of civil rights provided by federal law or the Constitution. Mr. Trump is also charged with a fourth count of obstructing an official proceeding.
“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — 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,” the indictment said.
The charges signify an extraordinary moment in United States history: a former president, in the midst of a campaign to return to the White House, being charged over attempts to use the levers of government power to subvert democracy and remain in office against the will of voters.
The indictment came more than two and a half years after a pro-Trump mob — egged on by incendiary speeches by Mr. Trump and his allies — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in the worst attack on the seat of Congress since the War of 1812.
It contains snippets of new information, such as the White House counsel, Pat A. Cipollone, imploring Mr. Trump to pull back objections to President Biden’s victory being certified by Congress hours after the rioters entered the building, and Mr. Trump refusing.
A federal grand jury returned the indictment a little more than eight months after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Smith, a career federal prosecutor, to oversee both the election tampering and classified documents inquiries into Mr. Trump. It came just over a year after a House select committee held high-profile hearings on the Jan. 6 attack and what led to it that laid out extensive evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election results.
Mr. Garland moved to name Mr. Smith as special counsel just days after Mr. Trump declared that he was running for president again.
In a statement, Mr. Trump denounced the new charges.
“Why did they wait two and a half years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024?” he said, calling it “election interference” and comparing the Biden administration to Nazi Germany.
Mr. Trump now faces two separate federal indictments. In June, Mr. Smith brought charges in Florida accusing Mr. Trump — the current front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — of illegally holding on to a highly sensitive trove of national defense documents and then obstructing the government’s attempts to get them back. He is scheduled to go on trial in that case in May.
The scheme charged by Mr. Smith on Tuesday in the election case played out largely in the two months between Election Day in 2020 and the attack on the Capitol. During that period, Mr. Trump took part in a range of efforts to retain power despite having lost the presidential race to Mr. Biden.
In addition to federal charges in the election and documents cases, Mr. Trump also faces legal troubles in state courts.
He has been charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a case that centers on hush money payments made to the porn star Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.
The efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his election loss are also the focus of a separate investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga. That inquiry appears likely to generate charges this month.
As former President Donald J. Trump campaigns for the White House while multiple criminal prosecutions against him play out, at least one thing is clear: Under the laws of physics, he cannot be in two places at once.
Generally, criminal defendants must be present in the courtroom during their trials. Not only will that force Mr. Trump to step away from the campaign trail, possibly for weeks at a time, but the judges overseeing his trials must also jostle for position in sequencing dates. The collision course is raising extraordinary — and unprecedented — questions about the logistical, legal and political challenges of various trials unfolding against the backdrop of a presidential campaign.
“The courts will have to decide how to balance the public interest in having expeditious trials against Trump’s interest and the public interest in his being able to campaign so that the democratic process works,” said Bruce Green, a Fordham University professor and former prosecutor. “That’s a type of complexity that courts have never had to deal with before.”
The complications make plain another reality: Mr. Trump’s troubles are entangling the campaign with the courts to a degree the nation has never experienced — raising tensions around the ideal of keeping the justice system separate from politics.
Already, Mr. Trump is facing a state trial on civil fraud accusations in New York in October. Another trial on whether he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to open on Jan. 15 — the same day as the Iowa caucuses. On Jan. 29, a trial begins in yet another lawsuit, this one accusing Mr. Trump, his company and three of his children of using the family name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.
Because those cases are civil, Mr. Trump could choose not to attend the trials, just as he shunned an earlier lawsuit by Ms. Carroll, in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.
But he will not have that option in a criminal case on charges in New York that he falsified business records as part of covering up a sex scandal shortly before the 2016 election. The opening date for that trial, which will most likely last several weeks, is in late March, about three weeks after Super Tuesday, when over a dozen states vote on March 5.
In the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents, the federal judge overseeing the case set a trial date for May 20, 2024. That is after the bulk of the primary contests and less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July.
Jack Smith, the special counsel, charged former President Donald J. Trump with four criminal counts, involving three conspiracies related to Mr. Trump’s attempts to overturn the victory of Joseph R. Biden Jr. in the 2020 election. Here are some highlights:
Mr. Trump faces a litany of serious charges.
Among the charges, prosecutors said that Mr. Trump tried to defraud the government, deprive people of their right to vote and obstruct an official proceeding. Each of the conspiracies were intended to target the collecting, counting and certifying of the results of the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that Mr. Trump was “determined to stay in power" and created an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith” in the country’s democratic foundations.
Mr. Trump had six co-conspirators, according to the indictment.
The indictment does not name the co-conspirators but the descriptions of them appear to match up with a number of people who were central to the investigation into election tampering conducted by prosecutors working for Mr. Smith. Among those people central to the inquiry were Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer who oversaw Mr. Trump’s attempts to claim the election was marred by widespread fraud; John Eastman, a law professor who provided the legal basis to overturn the election by manipulating the count of electors to the Electoral College; Sidney Powell, a lawyer who pushed Mr. Trump to use the military to seize voting machines and rerun the election; Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official at the time; and Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis, lawyers who helped flesh out the plan to use fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in states that were won by President Biden.
Prosecutors say Mr. Trump undertook many schemes to stay in power.
The indictment points to several instances in which Mr. Trump plotted to overturn the election and sow doubt about the votes that were cast in seven states. Prosecutors said that Mr. Trump hatched his criminal scheme after the election and along with his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use “deceit in targeted states.” The indictment lists how Mr. Trump tried to sow doubt in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Prosecutors say Mr. Trump knew he was spreading elections lies.
Vice President Mike Pence said he saw no evidence of “outcome-determinative fraud”; senior Justice Department officials said there was no evidence to support the election fraud claims; and senior White House lawyers also told Mr. Trump the same thing. Among others who delivered a similar message were state legislators and officials as well as the courts that rejected every one of his lawsuits. The courts, prosecutors said, provided “real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”
How much in this indictment is new?
Much of what is in the indictment is already known because of the work of journalists and the extensive investigation done by the Jan. 6 committee of the House. Still, there appeared to be some new revelations, including the conduct of Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark whom the former president tried to install as the acting attorney general before that effort was thwarted by officials at the Justice Department.
If former President Donald J. Trump wins the presidency even as criminal charges against him still loom, a series of extraordinary complications would ensue.
The indictment on Tuesday on federal charges stemming from his attempts to remain in power after his 2020 election loss added to the mounting legal peril Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican Party, faces as he campaigns for a second term in the White House.
In New York, he is accused of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment while the special counsel, Jack Smith, also previously accused Mr. Trump of mishandling national security secrets.
Were a federal case to still be pending on Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump could simply use his power as president to force the Justice Department to drop the matter, as he has suggested he might do.
(It is not yet clear when a trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election will start. The classified documents case, which will be tried in Florida, has a date set for May, but that could change depending on how pretrial arguments unfold.)
But the Constitution does not give presidents supervisory authority over state prosecutors, so that would not work for the state inquiries in New York and Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has indicated she is nearing a decision on charges in her own election-interference investigation.
The most Mr. Trump could probably do is try to delay a trial over any state charges that may be pending. In the past, the Justice Department has taken the position that criminal legal proceedings against a president while he is in office would be unconstitutional because it would interfere with his ability to perform his duties.
There is no definitive Supreme Court ruling on the matter because the issue has never arisen before. In 1997, the Supreme Court allowed a federal lawsuit against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was in office — but that was a civil case, not a criminal one.
If Mr. Trump were to be convicted in one or more cases, he is almost certain to pursue appeals, delaying any sentencing and all but ensuring he is not incarcerated by Inauguration Day. The question would then arise of what would happen if he took office for a second term.
Should Mr. Trump be convicted in a federal case, he would likely then move to pardon himself, a power he claimed in 2018 that he had the “absolute right” to wield. It is not clear whether a self-pardon would be legitimate.
No text in the Constitution bars a president from doing so. But in 1974, the Justice Department issued a terse legal opinion stating that President Richard Nixon did not appear to have the authority to pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”
But the opinion did not explain what transformed that principle into an unwritten limit on the power the Constitution bestows on presidents. Legal experts have disagreed on that question, but no president has ever claimed he was pardoning himself, so it has never been tested in court.
In such a scenario, Mr. Trump is almost certain to use his control of the Justice Department to ensure that it sides with him on whether a self-pardon is legitimate. If prosecutors do not challenge a self-pardon, it is not clear who else would have legal standing to pursue the matter.
Should Mr. Trump be convicted in New York or Georgia, he could not pardon himself because the Constitution does not empower a president to forgive state offenses. That is instead a power wielded by governors. If the relevant governor did not pardon him, he could seek a federal court order delaying any incarceration — or requiring his release from prison — while he is the sitting president, on constitutional grounds.
Yet another possibility is that if he is incarcerated, upon the start of his second term, he could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment as “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”
But that outcome would require the majority of a president’s cabinet, along with the vice president, to make such a determination. Among the questions that possibility would raise is who would qualify as a cabinet member if the Senate has not confirmed any new political appointees by Mr. Trump
More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.
Even as the special counsel, Jack Smith, pursued an investigation of former President Donald J. Trump for seeking to overturn the 2020 election, the Justice Department did not slow its sweeping pursuit of pro-Trump rioters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
As of July, prosecutors have charged nearly 1,100 people in connection with the attack. The Justice Department could ultimately bring indictments against as many as 1,000 more in the months to come.
More than 350 people charged so far stand accused of assaulting police officers, including about 110 who used a deadly or dangerous weapon. Another 310 people have been charged with the obstruction of an official proceeding, the go-to count that prosecutors have used to describe how members of the mob disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place inside the Capitol at a joint session of Congress.
More 100 rioters have gone to trial in Federal District Court in Washington, starting with Guy Wesley Reffitt, a Texas militiaman who was convicted in March 2022 of helping to lead an advance against the police that resulted in the first violent breach of the Capitol.
The vast majority of those who have faced trial have been found guilty of at least one crime or another; only two people — a former government contractor from New Mexico and a low-level member of the Oath Keepers militia — have been acquitted of all the charges they faced.
About 560 defendants have been sentenced. Of those, more than 330 have been ordered to serve some amount of time in prison.
The most serious and complex trials so far have involved the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, another far-right organization. The leaders of the groups — Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio — were both convicted of seditious conspiracy along with some of their lieutenants.
Mr. Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, was sentenced in May to 18 years in prison — the longest sentence given so far in any Jan. 6 criminal case.
Mr. Tarrio is expected to be sentenced this summer.
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