Finally there is an indictment of Donald Trump as the center of the plotting that led to the January 6 rioting and the attempt to overthrow Constitutional processes to keep himself in office. It is grave and monumental.
It’s a set of charges, and not a conviction, of course, but it is a call for accountability that seems overdue by years.
The expected pushback will repeat Republican yelling about witch hunts and political weaponization, as if Trump himself had not been trying exactly to use all the arms of government towards his personal preservation. And the legal shenanigans that will unfold to delay, diminish, or otherwise fight the charges will take up all the air in the room.
But the timing of the indictment itself comes as we are getting admissions in court that, in his behalf, Rudy Giuliani, he made false statements in asserting that two Georgia election workers had mishandled ballots while counting votes during the 2020 election. And that Trump won the election. And that all the scheming, bullying, intimidating, and secret maneuvering to cancel certification of election results were perfect and legal.
In other words, the Big Lie was based on its own Big Lies, from the start to the very awful end.
As we learned in those congressional hearings on January 6-related plots, there was no widespread election falsification and there remains no evidence of the Big Lie. Not in Georgia, or Arizona, or other states in which Trump claimed elections were rigged against him.
What there is, however, is debris of a campaign that hurt real individuals like Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, the two election workers in Atlanta, the dead and injured police officers at the Capitol, and the thousands of misled militia members and followers who believed Trump then and now are jailed or facing prosecution.
By any account, Trump tried to undercut the central element of a representative democracy by interfering with voting results. With these charges, it should be obvious even to his followers that the various tactics pursued to keep Trump in office broke federal law in several ways. The only question is whether a jury gets a chance anytime soon to say that the evidence says that Trump knew so too.
And through all of this, Trump wants to be elected president again – specifically to quash the very legal systems he wants us to ask him to command.
The Partisanship Question
However “political” this indictment is depicted by MAGA America because it comes amid an active presidential campaign, we should at least be able to acknowledge that there was no day since January 7, 2021, on which it would be seen as anything but partisan.
What has been striking since those horrible live television images we all watched of rioters called to Washington and pointed at the Capitol has been the consistent public relations campaign by Republicans to re-interpret the events of the day and these times for innocent protest by tourists or planted Democrats or Antifa leftists.
The degree of pushback – all for partisan political reasons, not for any concept of justice that any of us understand – is so remarkable that we now have active congressional talk of impeaching Joe Biden for stretching allegations about his son into a grand scheme that includes the president as if this is all tit for tat.
Just as there is no doubt that Trump removed government documents, many classified, to which he had no right and resisted government attempts to reclaim them, there is no doubt that Donald Trump was at the center of multiple plots to halt certification of Electoral College votes, to seek to seat illegal fraudulent electoral state delegate slates, to take part, directly and through his inner circle, in multiple plots to remain in office.
Even with months or more of delay to name a special counsel, what apparently has taken all this time is getting the evidence lined up to make the case in court, even as Trump has made his legal troubles into the sole election issue that matters.
Despite all the caterwauling about how American legal systems are based on equality before the law, about how we are a nation of laws, the clear conclusion of any being landing on the planet for the first time and assessing our situation would see that the legal system is seen as applying to us chumps and not to the likes of Donald Trump.
If you believe that Trump has done nothing to break multiple federal laws, you would want to bring on the trial(s) as soon as humanely possible.
If you believe that the charges have merit, it seems astounding that a good chunk of the country stands ready to vote for a presidential candidate who appears headed for jail – or to a job in which he will overthrow the Justice Department’s prosecution.
In any case, we will not be hearing about justice or accountability, but about victimhood and persecution – and lots of legal maneuvering to postpone or evade a day in court.
The Charges
That a leading presidential candidate should force the country into a constitutional crisis – as Trump himself had warned about potential charges against Hillary Clinton back in 2015 – is its own indictment by his own words.
The charges about election overthrow plotting come as federal prosecutors also have sharpened the obstruction counts against Trump in the Mar-a-Lago documents case for conspiring to destroy evidence, and as Georgia officials were moving towards state charges arising from the election denial campaign.
Clearly, Special Counsel Jack Smith had a wide variety of charges from which to select for the indictment, given that multiple, serial attempts to challenge election results. Those ranged from state voting challenges, creation of alternate, but fraudulent delegate slates, attempts to unleash the military to seize voting machines, calling for hordes to come to Washington to stop certification, and sitting on his hands as Trump rioters invaded the Capitol causing deaths, injuries, and threats of kidnap and hanging.
Retelling the events of that period has become a cottage industry with multiple books, videos, endless cable television analysis and the multi-month congressional hearings that featured testimony from lots of former Trump administration officials about the behind-the-scenes scheming.
According to the indictment, the charges revolve around defrauding the country by interfering with congressional certification of votes, around the specific scheming over fraudulent alternate election slates and over fraud in money-raising. They could have included sedition charges as with leaders of the Oath Keepers militia; conviction on those charges would disqualify Trump from office in accordance with the Constitution.
By contrast, the dozens of counts in all these indictments just mean Trump would be an awful choice for the White House – even without regard to the policies for which he may stand.
The indictment accused Trump – and six co-defendants — of a conspiracy to defraud the United States, a conspiracy to threaten the rights of others, a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding before Congress and obstruction of an official proceeding. Expect continuing discussion for days about the nature of these charges and what was not chosen as alternatives. Convictions on the first two would carry a sentence of up to five years in prison each; the obstruction charges carry up to 20 years.
Of course, Trump wants the trial delayed until after the 2024 election where he hopes to win or to have a Republican win to pardon him and anyone connected to January 6 planning.
Again, if Trump believes in his innocence, he should agree to an early trial. There is nothing to be solved by more delay, If he pushes for delay, we can only believe that he wants to win and to quash the charges, the very deep-state abuse of office he claims to oppose.