Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges Tuesday for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the US Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.
The four-count indictment was the third criminal case against Trump.
It’s the first time the defeated president, who is the early front-runner for next year's Republican presidential nomination, is facing legal consequences for his frantic but ultimately failed effort to cling to power.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. “It was fueled 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 Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them.
Trump was the only person charged in Tuesday's indictment. But prosecutors obliquely referenced a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results. They also advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Democrat Joe Biden to falsely claim that Trump had actually won them.
