I thought, due to the historic nature of the document, it
was worth reading the 45-page indictment
of the former President for myself. A lot of it is stuff I already knew
from Impeachment trial and from reading Vice
President Pence’s book and Bob Woodward’s book
on the subject. That said, there were some things that struck me:
The fraudulent electors were tricked into participating
based on the understanding that their votes would be used only if the Trump
Campaign lawsuits determined that Donald Trump won their state. Instead, the
Trump Campaign used their false certifications of Trump’s election in malicious
and illegal ways. In other words, these folk put their name on official
documents and their reputations on the line, with the understanding that they
were doing so to fast-track recertification in case some of the 32 court cases
filed went for Trump, but those documents were instead used to spread
confusion.
The Trump Whitehouse sent official letters to various state
officials telling them the Justice Department had found issues that had
impacted the election outcome in their state, after the Justice Department
had reported the exact opposite to the President and his staff.
There were at least 7 officials who informed the
president that the election was not stolen, most of whom were trusted by
the president and stood to gain by agreeing with the president that the 2020
election was stolen, including: his Vice President, his Attorney, the Director
of National Intelligence, campaign staff, and various courts.
Even his co-conspirators knew they were grasping at straws.
Their refrain was “we don’t have evidence, but we have lots of theories.”
The co-conspirators were referred to inside the Trump Campaign
as “Our Elite Strike Force Legal Team” and their theories were called, pardon
the language in the quote: “conspiracy sh*t beamed down from the
mothership.”
There were at least 4 regular citizens whose lives, and
the lives of their families, were threatened because of statements the
President made about them.
The President told the Georgia Secretary of State and his
Lawyer that if they didn’t find 11,780 votes for him, they would be put at
risk and committing a crime.
The stated goal of fraudulent electors (at least the ones
from Arizona) was to get congress to fight about which slate ought to be counted.
Again, going against what they’d told the actual electors.
One of the co-conspirators threatened to take over the
Attorney General’s job if he didn’t do what the conspiracy wanted.
On multiple occasions there were conversations about how this
conspiracy would directly lead to violence. The responses were consistently
cavalier. For example, Mike Pence warned that this would cause “elections to be
decided in the streets.” Violence was seen as preferable and “necessary.”
After the Vice President explicitly told the President he
would not obstruct the certification of the 2020 election because it wasn’t
within his constitutional power, the President responded by issuing a
public statement that read, “The Vice President and I are in total agreement
that the Vice President has the power to act.”
There were other things I underlined in the indictment, but
that gives you a sense of the allegations that the four-count case makes against
the former President.
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