Jack Smith, the US special counsel, has filed revised charges against former President Donald Trump for his alleged attempts to interfere in the 2020 election after he lost to current president, Joe Biden.
The new filing slims down the allegations against the 2024 Republican presidential nominee in light of the US Supreme Court’s ruling on presidential immunity.
The facts and evidences of Smith’s case still charges Trump with conspiracies to defraud the government system that counts election votes and to corrupt and obstruct the process of certifying Joe Biden’s victory. It also accuses him of hatching a conspiracy against the bedrock right of citizens to cast a vote and have it counted.
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The new charge document argues that Trump acted as a private citizen – and not as president – when he undertook the alleged scheme to sway the election.
“The Defendant had no official responsibilities related to the certification proceeding, but he did have a personal interest as a candidate in being named the winner of the election,” reads one new line in the indictment.
But in deference to the Supreme Court ruling, Smith removed language that alleges that Trump used the Justice Department to promote his claims of electoral fraud. And he attempted to style much of the remaining alleged conduct as that of a “candidate” rather than a president acting in his official capacity, to get around the issue at the center of the court’s ruling.
According to CNN, his case still faces huge obstacles. Presiding District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan must now interpret the high court’s ruling to decide which evidence remains admissible. And the ex-president’s legal team will fight Smith at every turn and use every appellate option available. The Trump legal and campaign team may accuse him of infringing Justice Department custom to avoid proceedings against key political figures so close to an election. Of course, the reason the original version of the case did not go to trial long before the election was partly because of the successful delaying tactics of Trump’s legal team.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t like how late this is happening, he should not have been delaying and postponing for many, many months,” Maryland Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Democrat who sat on the House committee that investigated the January 6, 2021, attack on the US Capitol, said on CNN’s “The Situation Room.” “Jack Smith is playing the cards he’s been dealt by Donald Trump and by Trump’s supporters on the Roberts Court who have made this go as slow as possible. And I think there’s something quietly heroic about Jack Smith insisting on going forward to make sure that this plot comes to light.” he said..
For all its success in delaying the initial January 6 federal case, the ex-president’s camp was unable to prevent Trump’s conviction in a hush money case related to the 2016 election and a massive fraud judgement against him, his firm and his adult sons in New York. Trump was also found liable for defamation in another case over sexual assault allegations by writer E. Jean Carroll. But a Trump-appointed judge in Florida recently dismissed Smith’s classified documents case against Trump (the special counsel is appealing). And another election meddling case, in Georgia, has been beset by multiple delays. The former president has pleaded not guilty to all charges in all cases, CNN reported.
The political significance of Smith’s fresh attempt to force Trump to face unaccustomed accountability for his actions adds another dimension to the ex-president’s new face-off with the replacement Democratic nominee, Harris.
The revised indictment will freshen the issue of Trump’s alleged criminality and autocratic ambitions in the minds of voters, after his mountain of legal woes faded as a driving force in the campaign in the furor over Biden’s disastrous debate performance, his subsequent withdrawal from the race and Harris’ storming start to her own campaign. Although there’s no chance the case could come to trial before the election, any attempt by Smith to hold evidentiary hearings in the coming weeks could create a new wave of news coverage about Trump’s alleged criminality as early in-person and absentee voting begins.
Being indicted, yet again, in the middle of a presidential campaign would be a disqualifying badge of shame for most candidates. Yet Trump has used his criminal problems to revive his campaign before – especially during the Republican primary contest. His new indictment came almost exactly a year after he showed up to be booked in an Atlanta jail and submitted to a mug shot that his campaign turned into a defiant emblem.
Trump has struggled in recent weeks to find traction for his campaign against a new Democratic nominee. And the issue of the ex-president’s legal woes had not been a central focus of the election race in recent months. But no sooner had the new Smith charges been filed, the muscle memory of his team returned, as he revived the core narrative of his bid for a second term — a false claim that he’s a victim of election interference by a weaponized Biden Justice Department. The ex-president accused Smith of trying to “resurrect a ‘dead’ Witch Hunt in Washington, D.C., in an act of desperation.” He also claimed the new indictment was a new attempt at election interference to distract from the “catastrophes Kamala Harris has inflicted on our Nation.”
If Trump defeats Democrat Kamala Harris, he is widely expected to order the justice department to drop all the federal charges that he faces.
