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Donald Trump may have thought that a Supreme Court decision granting presidents sweeping immunity for official acts protected him from criminal charges related to his 2020 coup attempt, but special counsel Jack Smith and a federal grand jury seem to feel otherwise.
The federal prosecutor on Tuesday secured a superseding indictment against Trump in an effort to comply with the high court’s landmark ruling while also attempting to hold the former president accountable for the actions he took to cling to power in the aftermath of his election loss to Joe Biden.
“The superseding indictment, which was presented to a new grand jury that had not previously heard evidence in this case, reflects the Government’s efforts to respect and implement the Supreme Court’s holdings and remand instructions,” Smith wrote in a court filing accompanying the indictment.
The new indictment, which you can read here, is 36 pages long. It specifically states that it is not about Trump’s Big Lie that the election was somehow stolen from him.
“As a candidate and a citizen, the Defendant had a right, like every American, to speak publicly about the election and even to claim, falsely, that there had been outcome-determinative fraud during the election and that he had won,” the document stated, adding that the then-president was also entitled to pursue legal avenues to challenge the result, which Trump (unsuccessfully) did.
However, he did more than that.
“Shortly after election day, the Defendant also pursued unlawful means of discounting legitimate votes and subverting the election results,” the indictment states, adding that his actions amounted to conspiracies to obstruct the proceedings used to determine the winner of the presidential election, to impede the certification of the result, and against the people’s right to vote and have their vote counted.
Not surprisingly, Trump didn’t take this new development well.
The former president expressed his belief that his coup attempt should be legal but that holding him accountable for it amounts to “election interference.”
“For them to do this immediately after our Supreme Court Victory on Immunity and more, is shocking,” wrote Trump in a series of social media posts.
“The case has to do with ‘Conspiracy to Obstruct the 2020 Presidential Election,’ when they are the ones that did the obstructing of the Election, not me,” Trump added, accusing “them” of cheating.
He also noted that the new indictment comes right after Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg had informed Congress that his platforms had “demoted” stories about a laptop belonging to Hunter Biden due to concerns that they might be another Russian plot to help Trump. Ultimately, there was no evidence that these stories were planted by Moscow. However, they also did not provide evidence that Joe Biden was involved in some corruption scheme.
Of course, that doesn’t matter to Trump… and neither does the fact that he was president when this alleged interference took place, or that his appointees were overseeing the Department of Justice.
“What they are doing now is the single greatest sabotage of our Democracy in History,” Trump wrote.
That seems like a dubious claim since Smith and his team neither called any secretaries of states to help them “find” votes, nor came up with “fake elector” schemes, nor stormed the Capitol.
In terms of actually affecting the election, it seems as though this superseding indictment will not have much of an impact because it is unlikely that the case will go to trial before November 5, which Trump calls the most important date in US history.
While he is wrong about that, it might turn out to be a crucial day for him in his pursuit of continuing to evade accountability from actions he took before, during, and after being president.
