2024-08-29 00:50:02
WASHINGTON — Adjusting for the U.S. Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision last month, U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday filed a fresh federal indictment alleging former President Donald Trump attempted to overturn the 2020 election in his favor.
In a superseding indictment filed in the late afternoon, Smith emphasized the private nature of Trump and his co-conspirators’ alleged conduct and omitted allegations that Trump pressured Department of Justice officials to overturn election results.
The new indictment, which will replace the original August 2023 document, comes after the Supreme Court ruled on July 1 that presidents enjoy criminal immunity for their official “core constitutional” duties while in office, but are not immune for unofficial acts.
The justices returned the case to the federal trial court level following the ruling.
Earlier this month, U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan granted Smith’s request for more time to assess how the immunity ruling could impact the election subversion case against Trump. The parties are set to meet in court for a pre-trial hearing on Sept. 5.
In his superseding document, Smith left out a substantial section from the original indictment that detailed Trump’s conversations with former Department of Justice officials about his alleged scheme to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. Trump’s pressure campaign on the department allegedly included urging officials to send letters to state election officials falsely claiming investigations into election results, according to the original indictment.
Smith also focuses attention on the superseding indictment to Trump’s lack of a formal role in the states’ certification of election results.
“The defendant had no official responsibilities related to any state’s certification of the election results,” Smith wrote in the revised indictment.
He later added, “The defendant had no official responsibilities related to the convening of legitimate electors or their signing and mailing of their certificates of vote.”
Core to the charges against Trump are his alleged conspiracies with private attorneys and state election officials to produce and deliver false slates of electors to Vice President Mike Pence and Congress for final certification on Jan. 6, 2021.
Those states included Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Both the former and superseding indictments allege Trump repeated false claims about election results on his Twitter account leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021.
However, the fresh indictment states that while Trump “sometimes used his Twitter account to communicate with the public, as President, about official actions and policies, he also regularly used it for personal purposes — including to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud, exhort his supporters to travel to Washington, D.C., on January 6 [and] pressure the Vice President to misuse his ceremonial role in the certification proceeding [.]”
Smith also wrote in the superseding indictment that Trump’s remarks to supporters on Jan. 6, 2021, at the Ellipse — the park between the White House and Washington Monument — amounted to a “campaign speech at a privately-funded, privately-organized political rally held on the Ellipse.”
The felony criminal charges against Trump remain unchanged in the new indictment.
Trump is accused of conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of, and attempt to obstruct, an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
