“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. “It was fuelled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.” The charges signify an extraordinary moment in US 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.
The 45-page indictment described how Trump and six co-conspirators employed a variety of means to reverse his defeat in the election almost from the moment that voting ended. It depicted how Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the justice department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joe Biden. And it described how he ultimately pressured his vice-president, Mike Pence, to use the fake electors to subvert the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol. The indictment mentioned Trump’s “exploitation of the violence and chaos”, but did not accuse him of inciting the riot. The co-conspirators were not named, but based on the descriptions, they appear to include Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani.
The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them
Trump was ordered to make an initial appearance in federal court in Washington on Thursday. The case has been assigned to US district judge Tanya Chutkan, who was appointed by Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama. The most serious charge against Trump carries a maximum penalty of 20 years in prison. NYT & Agencies