Trump indicted for efforts to overturn 2020 election
“You’re too honest.”
Then-President Donald Trump (the Defendant) berated Vice President Mike Pence on a January 1, 2021 phone call for resisting his plan to seek a court ruling stating that “the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution.” So alleges special counsel Jack Smith’s 45-page indictment (gifted article) of Trump on three conspiracy charges and one for obstruction of an official proceeding.
- 18 USC 371 (conspiracy to defraud the US)
- 18 USC 1512(k) (conspiracy to obstruct the vote certification)
- 18 USC 1512(c)(2) (obstructing the vote certification)
- 18 USC 241( conspiracy to violate civil rights)
Along with Trump the indictment references six unnamed co-conspirators. Unnamed because they have not yet been charged, several are obvious from details in the indictment, Co-Conspirators 1 through 4 being Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, and Jeffrey Clark. The Washington Post identifies appellate attorney Kenneth Chesebro as Co-Conspirator 5. The sixth is described as a “political consultant” involved in helping implement Trump’s fake electors scheme.
The Smith indictment draws heavily on the work of the House January 6 Committee but includes more detail than was public previously. In particular, Pence’s contemporaneous notes taken during the period after Trump lost reelection to Joe Biden in November 2020 will be featured evidence in the trial. The indictment details how the conspiracy unfolded across several states Trump’s allies contested.
Trump lies reflexively. Everyone not in his thrall knows that. The “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” Smith told reporters, was “fueled” by those lies. Smith’s indictment dials in on that behavior, stating that “for more than two months following election day on November 3, 2020, the Defendant spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false, and the Defendant knew that they were false. But the Defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway—to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Thus was born the conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election that resulted in hand-to-hand combat and death at the Capitol on January 6, 2021. A violent insurrection. A failed coup.
But Smith’s strategic decision is not to charge Trump with the insurrection but with the conspiracy that led to it and his efforts to thwart the peaceful transfer of power and to disenfranchise voters. Trump will stand trial alone. Smith wants “a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens.” The six unnamed co-conspirators will face trial separately or together, once charged. Smith’s investigation into other individuals is ongoing.
Perhaps most shocking is evidence that then-Department of Justice official (Civil Division) Jeffrey Clark was prepared to accept violence in the streets if Trump remained in office, and for Trump to put it down with U.S. troops.
“Well, [Deputy White House Counsel], that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.”
Even in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol violence, co-conspirators attempted to keep the coup plans afloat (Para. 119). Giuliani left a voice message that evening urging a senator to slow down the certification proceedings. Eastman (Para. 122) at 11:44 p.m. “emailed the Vice President’s Counsel advocating that the Vice President violate the law and seek further delay of the certification.”
MSNBC’s Chris Hayes remarked on the magnitude of the alleged crimes Tuesday evening, describing them as “in the canon of American events” along with the Civil War.
“This is the greatest political crime since secession,” Hayes added. “And the gravest test, that Lincoln called on the battlefield in Gettysburg of whether a nation of, by, and for the people, that we are our own masters, whether that can long endure.”
“If the law is not for this, what is it for?”
What has endured is the bitterness of the Confederacy’s defeat. With the end of Reconstruction came the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. Southern efforts to reduce freed Black people to serfdom, if not de facto slavery, included a reign of white terror and Jim Crow laws that endured for another century. Monuments to Confederate heroes planted across the land by the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) spread the myth of the Lost Cause. Their memorials to violent insurrection endured into the second decade of this century. Many still remain. Confederate battle flags feature prominently in Trump rallies and entered the Capitol with rioters on Jan. 6.
What endures in many “freedom-loving” conservative souls is a not-so-latent hunger for a monarch. Indeed, evangelicals are taught from childhood to yearn for the return of Christ to reign as king over the Earth. Every knee shall bow, etc. In Trump, they found one.
Karl Marx believed that the internal contradictions of capitalism would eventually destroy it. Perhaps what Lincoln saw in a Southern aristocracy willing to tear the country apart to preserve their medieval society was the latent tension between Americans’ monarchist impulses and their aspirations for democratic self-government. Trump’s attempted coup was the latest test of whether the latter might yet prevail. In an age of rising autocracy, that testing continues.
Do not expect that MAGA Republicans will not, as they have already begun, weave a new Lost Cause myth. They will paint prosecution of the coup conspirators, their foot soldiers, and “King Trump” as a betrayal as bitter and unjust as the War of Northern Aggression. One hundred years on, the ancestors of those who fought at the Capitol will romanticize them as true patriots.