At long last, Donald Trump charged with conspiring against the US
Donald J. Trump, once again, has been indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith and this, as they say, is the big one. It’s much more solid than the nebulous charge of falsifying business records to conceal another crime, as Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg’s state-level indictment is. It’s bigger than already well-evidenced claims, also brought by Smith, that Trump retained and mishandled classified information and then tried to hide that fact and those documents from federal officials.
It goes without saying that keeping highly sensitive documents in an unsecured resort and showing them to people in defiance of federal efforts to recover them puts the security of the United States at direct risk. Yet even that pales in comparison to the four counts in the indictment unsealed yesterday, which cumulatively allege that Trump and several co-conspirators jointly attempted to defraud the United States, interfere with official proceedings (the certification of the 2020 electoral vote) and conspire against the right to vote itself by targeting, threatening and harassing citizens only trying to exercise their rights.
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The 45-page document lays out in exhaustive detail how Trump and his attorneys and advisors attempted to send fake electors to Congress, stoke and exploit the Jan. 6 attack to impede the certification of the election and strong-arm state officials in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Arizona into changing the results. In the violent aftermath, they planned to invoke the Insurrection Act to crush dissent.
Some evidence cited comes from internal communications, interviews and recordings — who can forget the memorable recorded call of Trump telling Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” enough votes to flip the state — but much else didn’t need to be sought out by investigators, because it had already been broadcast to the whole world in real time. The indictment merely reiterates what we all saw play out live: Trump urging followers to march on the Capitol, directing the Justice Department to issue false statements about fraud and otherwise openly trying to engineer an end to the peaceful transfer of power that has been this country’s greatest legacy since its founding.
The grand jury that brought this indictment was empaneled at the scene of this assault on our system of government, Washington, D.C. It’s where Trump will face trial, the unprecedented circumstance of a former U.S. president facing formal criminal charges for effectively attempting to end American democracy. It won’t be easy finding a jury of 12 that can assess the evidence dispassionately, but it must be done to establish, as conclusively as our legal system allows, that Trump took direct aim at our country.
Some observers have balked at the idea that a one-time president and current front-running presidential candidate could be tried on the grounds that this is interference in the political process. On the contrary, it is not the prosecutors here who’ve done anything wrong, and true interference would be to stand back and allow Trump to avoid any consequences for his actions, or to deprive voters of a full accounting of his efforts to subvert the public’s will, especially as he asks them to put him back into the White House. Those who still choose to vote for him will do so with clear eyes about what he is.
—New York Daily News Editorial Board
