On August 1, former president Donald Trump was indicted for multiple alleged crimes in his effort to overturn the 2020 election results. The 45-page indictment displays and explains how Trump knowingly spread false information about fraud and electors, and attempted to block the certification of the election on January 6, 2021. This is the first time an American president has ever been indicted federally.
Trump's charges include two felony counts of obstructing an official proceeding, one felony count of conspiracy to defraud the United States, and one felony count of conspiracy against rights. The indictment includes six unnamed co-conspirators, but CNN speculates that five of these people are Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jeffrey Clark, and Kenneth Chesebro.
This is on top of his three other criminal cases in which he faces 34 felony counts in connection with hush money payments to Stormy Daniels ahead of the 2016 election and 40 felony counts for keeping classified documents in his Mar-a-Lago home; a Georgia prosecutor is also investigating Trump's interference in the 2020 election in the state.
The former president has denied wrongdoing in all the cases.
Others are not so sure. "As we got closer to January 6, I knew he was cooking up all these things, but what was he going to do about it?" said Rep. Nancy Pelosi in an interview with New York magazine. "It was clear that he knew he did not win the election."
A Politico article explaining the ongoing criminal cases explains that one of the strengths of the Jan. 6 case is the fact that "many of the top aides in the Trump administration testified to the grand jury, giving investigators remarkable insight into what was happening privately in Trump's orbit during the critical two-month period and perhaps providing important evidence about Trump's state of mind. [Former Vice President Mike] Pence — who resisted Trump's pressure to try to annul the election results on Jan. 6 — was the most notable witness. Others included Trump's former chief of staff, Mark Meadows; his White House counsel, Pat Cipollone; his national security adviser, Robert O'Brien; and his senior policy adviser, Stephen Miller."
Despite the indictment and ongoing criminal investigations, if Trump is convicted, he can still run for president in 2024. The only requirements for running for federal office, according to the Supreme Court, are what's written in the Constitution.
"Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be president of the United States," Pence said to reporters at the Indiana State Fair about Trump's Jan. 6 case. "And anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again."
Trump faces yet another indictment: Over 70 felony charges and counting
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