The Murder of Jan. 6, 2021: Donald Trump’s Campaign for Justice and the Freedom of Elections in Michigan and Other Regions
On that day, Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol, injuring scores of law enforcement officers, forcing a panicked evacuation of the nation’s political leaders and threatening the peaceful transfer of power after Trump lost the 2020 presidential election.
And all of these investigations are happening separately from the Justice Department’s sprawling and complex investigation into the events of Jan. 6, 2021.
There are ongoing investigations into election interference in other places. In Arizona, the attorney general is investigating the fake electors, while a Georgia prosecutor is going to announce charges soon in her investigation into the attempts to overturn the 2020 election there.
Matthew DePerno, a candidate for the position of Michigan attorney general who worked with Trump’s team, was charged in state court with attempting to gain access to voting machines.
Donald Trump is accused of committing crimes before, during, and after his presidency. The latest indictment alleges facts from all quarters to prove his criminality: from the vice president to the White House counsel and the heads of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security and the Office of National Intelligence, as well as many others. All are Republicans.
And it works. In March, several weeks before the first indictment, Trump had just 43% of the vote in Republican polling, according to a RealClearPolitics average. But a day after he was charged in a hush-money scheme to an adult film actress, his numbers had jumped to 50%.
That’s because, after two impeachments, three indictments and quite a few scandals in between, Trump has conditioned his supporters to see each allegation against him as a reason to rally around him.
The 2016 Capitol Attack: Why did the FBI attack on Jan. 6, 2021, killed a member of the U.S. House of Representatives?
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said the special counsel in a short statement before reporters. The indictment said it was fueled by lies. The lies were intended to impede a function of the U.S. government.
Franco Ordoez, an NPR White House correspondent, explained in an interview with All things Considered that the attacks from Trump and his supporters are not so much about substance.
The identity of the rest of the co-conspirators couldn’t be immediately confirmed. The information in the indictment matches information included in the ex-president’s election campaign and subsequent attempts to overturn the results, like attorney Sidney Powell and Jeffrey Clark.
Six people are labeled as co-conspirators in the indictment. The numbers and potentially identifying characteristics that they are given is not identified in the court document.
Trump is the only person who is charged and he is the only defendant in this latest indictment. But the court document scatters some clues for the future in terms of who else might potentially face charges.
The former president now faces legal peril in three criminal cases — following March’s indictment on 34 counts of falsifying business records and June’s indictment on 37 counts of mishandling classified documents. Trump has pleaded not guilty in both cases.
Trump is still the leader in the Republican primary despite being summoned to appear in court. We could hear about his trial as he makes his case for the White House if he pleads not guilty.
The select committee referred Mr. Trump for inciting an insurrection but Mr. Smith decided not to do so. In this case, the Justice Department hasn’t ever charged insurrection since the 19th century, and in all other attacks on the Capitol it’s never been charged. Since no one else has been charged with the crime since that date, it’s likely that it would have been an issue. And since the penalty for the insurrection offense is that the defendant would not be eligible to hold federal office, it would have fueled a claim of weaponizing the Justice Department to defeat a political rival.
The indictment is clever in avoiding a Trump claim ofselective prosecution. It would have been an act of non-prosecution if Mr. Trump had not been brought to justice. The Justice Department has already charged and obtained convictions for myriad foot soldiers related to the attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including charging well over 300 people for obstructing the congressional proceedings. In this indictment, the special counsel Jack Smith wisely brings that same charge, but now against the alleged leader of the effort to thwart the transfer of power.
Clark featured heavily in the House’s Jan. 6 committee hearings that revealed Trump had floated the idea of firing then-acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen and replacing him with Clark, an environmental lawyer at the DOJ. Clark supports a plan to push fake slates of electors in many states, after embracing claims of election fraud by Trump.
Powell is an attorney and federal prosecutor who had a hand in spreading lies after the 2020 election that Dominion Voting Systems’ machines had flipped votes. Powell and Giuliani were later sued by Dominion separately over these claims.
The ongoing investigation into Trump and his associates’ actions in Georgia led a special grand jury to issue subpoenas for both Giuliani and Eastman.
Silverglate and Charles Burnham are both Eastman’s lawyers. “We have looked at the applicable laws.” We have concluded that he did not commit a crime.
The State Bar of California opened a case in Los Angeles to have him lose his law license because of his efforts to overturn the election.
He was very involved in the plan to send alternates of Trump’s Electoral Advisers to Congress. The crowd of Trump supporters got a dose of voter fraud and criticism of the VP during the Jan. 6 rally when Eastman made comments to them.
Predictions for the 2020 Election: A Correlated Case with Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, a former New York City Attorney
“I suppose it’s good news from my point of view that I’m an unindicted co-conspirator rather than an indicted co-conspirator. Getting legal advice about misinterpreted constitutional provisions is not and never has been a criminal action, and I think I’ll be called as a witness to help President Trump defend himself.
These were comments made by Giuliani at the rally. After the 9/11 attacks in New York, Rudy Giuliani was considered a hero and later a federal prosecutor who oversaw the prosecution of the city’s Mafia bosses during the 1980s.
The federal indictment says that co-conspirator 1 told the crowd that Vice President Mike Pence could “‘cast the [Electoral Count Act] aside and unilaterally decide on the validity of these crooked ballots.’ ” The indictment said co-conspirator 1 “also lied when he claimed to ‘have letters from five legislatures begging us’ to send elector slates to the legislatures for review, and called for ‘trial by combat.’ “
The 2020 election will be certified by Congress later that day, and Trump was scheduled to speak at a rally that day. The two men spoke to the former president.
The federal prosecutors describe this person as an “attorney who was willing to spread false claims and pursue strategies that the defendants’ re- election campaign wouldn’t.”
An attorney for Trump ally Rudy Giuliani, Robert J. Costello, confirmed to the New York Times that he “appears” to be co-conspirator 1. And John Eastman, a former Trump attorney, has said he is co-conspirator 2.
The former prosecutor told All Things Considered that the prosecutors’ choice to keep the names out of the indictment was probably done to make the case as simple as possible.
The quicker the case will go to trial, the more co-defendants there will be. So there’s obviously some belief and desire to get this case across the finish line in a timely fashion — which if there were six defendants instead of one probably would not happen, of course,” she said.
In this case, time is of the essence. The criminal case comes as Trump is campaigning for president and is having a lawsuit and two other criminal cases in New York and Florida.
Source: The latest Trump indictment lists 6 unnamed co-conspirators. Here’s what we know
A prosecutor’s comment on Eastman’s actions against the president and the Trump ‘their’ associates in the 21st century
“We’ve seen no indication that these people are even thinking about cooperating or that they even know who we are,” she said.
Harvey Silverglate, one of Eastman’s attorneys, told NPR that Eastman’s legal team figured out he is one of the co-conspirators on their own, through details offered in the court documents.
Silverglate said that at no point did federal investigators inform them that Eastman was a target of prosecutors — even after the indictment against Trump was published.
“I consider it highly indecent to name unindicted co-conspirators without using their names. Each person is entitled to know if he’s a target of this investigation,” Silverglate said. The Department of Justice has not had common decency or professional courtesy to tell us that he is a target.
Along with Eastman and Giuliani, Powell and Clark served as Trump’s allies and attempted to wield their powers in their respective positions to turn the election in Trump’s favor — an effort that exploded into violence when his supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, according to prosecutors.