Donald Trump is expected to appear in court on Thursday to
answer charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, a case that will
cast a dark and volatile cloud over the 2024 White House race for which he
remains the presumptive Republican nominee.
Metal barricades were erected around the E. Barret Prettyman
federal courthouse in Washington, where the arrest and arraignment of the
former president will take place within sight of the US Capitol that was
stormed by his supporters on January 6, 2021.
Police gathered outside the court early Thursday, while
scores of reporters from the world’s media camped overnight to seek a spot
inside.
The 77-year-old Trump is expected to enter a plea of not guilty at a hearing at 4:00 pm (2000 GMT) before magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya.
The accusations that Trump and six unnamed co-conspirators
plotted to upend the 2020 election is the former president’s third criminal
indictment since March, and the most serious of the cases threatening to derail
his comeback bid.
– ‘Knowingly false
claims’ –
Special counsel Jack Smith unveiled a 45-page indictment of
Trump on Tuesday charging him with conspiracy to defraud the United States and
attempting to disenfranchise American voters with his false claims that he won
the November 2020 election.
“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the
legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false
claims of election fraud,” the indictment said.
Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, linked
Trump’s actions following his loss to Democrat Joe Biden directly to the attack
on the Capitol, which he called an “unprecedented assault on the seat of
American democracy.”
“It was fueled by lies,” Smith said. “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.”
Trump is already scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May
of next year on charges that he took top secret government documents to his
Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida and refused to return them.
The twice-impeached former president also faces criminal
charges in New York for allegedly paying election-eve hush money to a porn
star.
Trump, who spent Wednesday playing golf at his Bedminster,
New Jersey club, has pleaded not guilty in the documents and hush money cases
and accused prosecutors of seeking to thwart his presidential bid with “fake”
indictments.
In a late-night post on his Truth Social platform, Trump
said Thursday’s case was “brought by Crooked Joe Biden & Deranged Jack
Smith,” again claiming that “this Indictment is all about Election
Interference!”
– ‘Should never be
president’ –
The new conspiracy charges raise the prospect of Trump being
further embroiled in legal proceedings at the height of what is expected to be
a bitter presidential campaign.
The plot allegedly included attempts to pressure Mike Pence
into throwing out Electoral College votes at the January 6 joint session of
Congress called to certify Biden’s win, which the vice president eventually
refused to do.
“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence, who is
also seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said Wednesday.
“Anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the
Constitution should never be president of the United States again,” he told
reporters in Indianapolis.
Although Trump’s arraignment will be before a magistrate
judge, the actual case is to be heard by US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan,
an appointee of former Democratic president Barack Obama, who has handed down
some of the stiffest sentences in cases involving Capitol riot participants.
Chutkan, 61, also has a legal history with Trump — she ruled
against him in a November 2021 case.
Trump had filed a lawsuit asserting executive privilege to
block documents from being handed over to a congressional committee
investigating the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.
He was no longer in the White House at the time, and Chutkan
dismissed the suit, saying the former president’s argument “appears to be
premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity.'”
“But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not
President,” Chutkan wrote.
As president, Trump was impeached by the House of
Representatives for seeking political dirt on Biden from Ukraine and over the
events of January 6, and was acquitted by the Senate both times.
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