List of All Articles with Tag 'elections'

Special counsel Jack Smith said Tuesday that the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol was "fueled by lies" told by former President Donald Trump. The indictment of Trump on four new federal criminal charges, all related to the former president's effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election, lays out some of those lies one by one.

By Andrew Goudsward The judge assigned to oversee the federal case against Donald Trump for attempting to overturn

Mr Trump is being indicted for allegedly plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat.

Donald Trump is in trouble once again. The former US president has been indicted over trying to mess with the 2020 election. He is accused of four counts including conspiracy to defraud the US, tampering with a witness and conspiracy against the rights of citizens. The indictment caps an inquiry into events surrounding the 6 January 2021 riot at the US Capitol. It is not the only issue Trump is facing. He has already been charged in two other cases: with mishandling classified files and falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to the porn star Stormy Daniels. Sign up to our free Indy100 weekly newsletter Nevertheless, he called the case "ridiculous" and denied wrongdoing. His campaign said: "The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes." It added: "These un-American witch hunts will fail." The election investigation has focused on Trump's actions in the two-month period between his loss to Joe Biden and the riot in Washington DC. The 45-page indictment lists six unnamed co-conspirators: four lawyers, a justice department official and a political consultant. The court document accuses Trump of a "conspiracy to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function through dishonesty, fraud and deceit". The man leading the inquiry, special counsel Jack Smith, said: "The attack on our nation's capital on January 6 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. "As described in the indictment it was fuelled by lies." Here's how people reacted: Mike Pence said the indictment against Trump was “an important reminder [that] anyone who puts himself over the constitution should never be president of the United States”. He also said that though Trump was entitled to be presumed innocent, “his candidacy means more talk about January 6 and more distractions”. “Trump’s presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills,” former Texas congressman Will Hurd said. “Furthermore, his denial of the 2020 election results and actions on January 6 show he’s unfit for office.” He added: “As Republicans we need to prioritise offering solutions to difficult issues affecting all Americans … if we make the upcoming election about Trump, we are giving Joe Biden another four years in the White House.” Trump also got some supportive messages from Republicans who believe it to be a distraction attempt to undermine the former president. Trump is due to appear in court on Thursday in Washington DC. This story is not going anywhere. Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.

By Panarat Thepgumpanat BANGKOK Thailand's election-winning Move Forward Party is no longer part of an eight-party coalition hoping

Donald Trump has been charged over an alleged plot to overthrow the 2020 election, adding to his growing list of legal woes. The ex-president now faces four counts of violating three sections of the federal criminal code as he and a group of allies schemed to find a way to somehow keep him in the White House for a second term despite losing to Joe Biden. Grand jurors in Washington DC have spent months hearing evidence and witness testimony as part of a long-running probe into Mr Trump’s efforts to overturn his election loss and the January 6 attack on the Capitol which sprung from those efforts. On Monday they approved the indictment against the Republican on charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding, and deprivation of rights under colour of law on Tuesday after a four-hour presentation by Department of Justice special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors. In a statement to reporters shortly after the indictment was unsealed, Mr Smith said the January 6 attack was “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy” that 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”. Mr Smith praised the law enforcement officers who defended the Capitol that day as “heroes ... patriots and they are the very best of us” who “put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people” and “defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States”. He also said the case against Mr Trump is part of the Justice Department’s efforts to “ensuring accountability for those criminally responsible for what happened that day” and said his office would seek a speedy trial of Mr Trump, who was summoned to appear in court to answer the charges on 3 August at 4.00 pm at the E Barrett Prettyman Courthouse in Washington. The indictment alleges that the ex-president engaged in a “conspiracy to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud, and deceit to impair, obstruct, and defeat the lawful federal government function by which the results of the presidential election are collected, counted, and certified by the federal government,” conspired to “corruptly obstruct and impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified,” and conspired against “conspiracy against the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted”. Prosecutors allege that Mr Trump had six co-conspirators, including five attorneys. According to the indictment, Mr Trump and his co-conspirators “co-conspirators used knowingly false claims of election fraud to get state legislators and election officials to subvert the legitimate election results and change electoral votes for the Defendant’s opponent, Joseph R. Biden, Jr., to electoral votes for the Defendant”. They further allege that Mr Trump “Defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors” in his favour. Prosecutors also cite the efforts by Mr Trump and his allies to cause fake electoral college certificates to be submitted for use by then-vice president Mike Pence to hijack the certification of the election and declare himself and Mr Trump the winners despite having lost. When Mr Pence refused, prosecutors allege that Mr Trump and co-conspirators “repeated knowingly false claims of election fraud to gathered supporters, falsely told them that the Vice President had the authority to and might alter the election results, and directed them to the Capitol to obstruct the certification proceeding and exert pressure on the Vice President to take the fraudulent actions he had previously refused”. They also allege that Mr Trump and his allies “exploited” the January 6 attack on the Capitol “disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those”. Continuing, they say Mr Trump and his co-conspirators “attempted to use the power and authority of the Justice Department to conduct sham election crime investigations and to send a letter to the targeted states that falsely claimed that the Justice Department had identified significant concerns that may have impacted the election outcome” as they “sought to advance the Defendant’s fraudulent elector plan by using the Justice Department’s authority to falsely present the fraudulent electors as a valid alternative to the legitimate electors”. A significant portion of evidence against the ex-president appears to come from testimony given by Mr Pence, the former vice president. A section of the indictment recounts several private conversations between Mr Trump and Mr Pence, including one in which Mr Trump complained that Mr Pence was “too honest” after he told the then-president that he lacked the power to overturn the election. The latest charges against Mr Trump are some of the most serious allegations levied against the twice-impeached, now thrice-indicted former president, and are just the first of two possible sets of charges that he could face as a result of his efforts to unlawfully reverse the result of his defeat nearly three years ago. A separate grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia has also been hearing evidence about efforts by Mr Trump and his allies to pressure Peach State officials into reversing his loss to Mr Biden there, and the district attorney who has been supervising that process has said charges be approved against multiple targets in the coming days. The addition of a second federal indictment to the legal troubles facing Mr Trump is certain to complicate his quest to return to the White House by winning next year’s presidential election. He is scheduled to be tried in two separate criminal cases against him, including on the federal charges against him and co-defendants Walt Nauta and Carlos De Oliveira which are pending in a Florida federal court as a result of their alleged roles in the ex-president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information and obstruction of justice. A separate case against him for allegedly falsifying business records in his former home state of New York is set to go to trial in March 2024, while the federal case in Florida is scheduled for trial in late May 2024. The ex-president has maintained that the multiple investigations against him amount to “election interference” and a politically motivated “hoax,” and has repeatedly attacked the prosecutors investigating him in extremely personal terms. These latest charges against Mr Trump are the result of an eight-month investigation by Mr Smith, who was appointed by US Attorney General Merrick Garland in November 2022 to supervise a pair of probes focusing on the ex-president’s conduct. In addition to investigating the ex-president’s alleged unlawful retention of national defence information, Mr Smith was also handed control long-running probe into the events leading up to the January 6 attack on the US Capitol, when a riotous mob of Mr Trump’s supporters stormed the seat of the US legislature in hopes of blocking the final certification of his loss to Mr Biden. While prosecutors in the office of the US Attorney for the District of Columbia have charged more than 1,000 people for various crimes committed during the riot — including rare seditious conspiracy charges against members of the Proud Boys and Oath Keepers extremist groups — the charges against Mr Trump [and his co-defendants] are the first to be brought against anyone for the efforts to overturn the election which arguably led to the Capitol attack. Mr Trump was impeached for inciting the attack with just days left in his presidency, and though a majority of senators voted to convict him, they fell short of the two-thirds supermajority required to sustain a conviction. But the ex-president and his co-defendants are not being charged for organising, inciting or fomenting what was the worst attack on the Capitol since British troops set it ablaze in 1814. Instead, the charges against them are for crimes which prosecutors allege to have been committed as Mr Trump sought to employ a variety of strategies by which he and his allies thought he could reverse or override the will of voters, including pressuring state legislatures to use their own authority to replace swing state electors for Mr Biden with electors for Mr Trump. Mr Trump and his allies also pushed state officials, most notably Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, to act to decertify Mr Biden’s wins in swing states, according to prosecutors. Figures connected to Mr Trump’s campaign also spearheaded an effort to submit forged electoral college certificates to the National Archives and to the Senate, while Mr Trump personally sought to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence into unilaterally throwing out the legitimate electoral certificates for Mr Biden in favour of the forged ones listing Mr Trump as the winner. The case currently pending against him in the Southern District of Florida arose out of a criminal referral from the National Archives and Records Administration after officials discovered documents bearing classification markings in a set of 15 boxes which the agency had retrieved from Mr Trump’s home at Mar-a-Lago, the 1920’s-era Palm Beach mansion turned private beach club where he maintains his primary residence and post-presidential office. Investigators later discovered more than 100 additional documents with classification markings during an 8 August 2021 search of Mr Trump’s property, and in June charged him with unlawfully withholding the documents from the government and obstructing efforts to determine whether all the classified documents in his possession had been returned. Read More Trump indictment – live: Trump’s team compares charges on 2020 election interference probe to ‘Nazi persecution’ CNN host rails against Donald Trump comparing prosecutors to Nazis Takeaways from the Trump indictment that alleges a campaign of 'fraud and deceit' Trump begs Congress to help save him from his legal troubles Who is Jack Smith? The ex-war crimes prosecutor who is coming for Trump Donald Trump is the first former president arrested on federal charges. Can he still run in 2024?

Fox Business reportedly buried their coverage of Donald Trump's indictment under a graphic accusing president Joe Biden of creating distractions following scandals in his family. In the graphic blasted on TV screens, "Biden's Scandal Distractions" can be seen written in red next to Mr Trump's image followed by a timeline of the former president's past indictments overlapping row surrounding Mr Biden and his family. Mr Trump was indicted on Tuesday for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, the third time in four months that the former president has been criminally charged. The four-count, 45-page indictment charges Mr Trump with conspiring to defraud the US by preventing Congress from certifying Joe Biden's victory and depriving voters of their right to a fair election. Mr Trump was ordered to make an initial appearance in federal court in Washington on Thursday. Minutes after the former president announced on Truth Social that he was to be indicted, Fox News host Jesse Watters compared the criminal charges against Mr Trump to "15 dozen" atomic bombs. "This is legal warfare, if it was political, it would have been political war crime. This is overkill. It is an atrocity. It is like not just dropping one atomic bomb, you drop 15 dozen," he said. "This is the establishment terrified at Donald Trump's re-election." Fox News last month expressed regret for showing an onscreen message that called President Biden a “wannabe dictator” who had his political rival arrested. The chyron appeared beneath split-screen video boxes that showed Mr Trump addressing supporters live in New Jersey, and Mr Biden speaking at the White House earlier in the day. The message read, “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” Fox in a statement said the “chyron was taken down immediately and was addressed.” Mediaite reported that the message was onscreen for 27 seconds and was not removed when the telecast was rerun late at night. Read More Trump indictment – live: Grand jury charges Trump on four counts in 2020 election interference probe How the Trump fake electors scheme became a 'corrupt plan,' according to the indictment Why Trump is charged under a civil rights law used to prosecute KKK terror Trump team compares charges on 2020 election interference probe to ‘Nazi persecution’ CNN host rails against Donald Trump comparing prosecutors to Nazis Takeaways from the Trump indictment that alleges a campaign of 'fraud and deceit'

By Jack Queen Donald Trump was charged on Tuesday with conspiracy to defraud the U.S. and other crimes

By Jacqueline Thomsen Besides criminal charges, former U.S. President Donald Trump faces some civil lawsuits over his effort

The role that fake slates of electors played in Donald Trump’s desperate effort to cling to power after his defeat in the 2020 election is at the center of a four-count indictment against the former president

"The United States of America v. Donald J. Trump" instantly became one of the most consequential documents in American history.

Donald Trump's dangerous lies about the 2020 election, which saturated right-wing media after the presidential contest and led to the January 6 insurrection at the US Capitol, have finally put the disgraced former president in serious legal jeopardy.