A federal grand jury has indicted Donald Trump on charges relating to his attempt to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Trump faces four charges: conspiracy to defraud the United States; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding; and conspiracy against rights.
The indictment says Trump “was determined to remain in power” despite losing the election.
To attain that goal, the indictment says the former president “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won.”
“These claims were false, and the defendant knew they were false,” but “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway,” the indictment adds.
Trump enlisted six unnamed co-conspirators to assist him in “his criminal efforts to overturn” the election, the indictment says.
The indictment accuses Trump and his co-conspirators of using “knowingly false claims of election fraud” to organize fraudulent slates of electors in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Trump and his co-conspirators also attempted to use the power of the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations,” and then-Vice President Mike Pence to overturn the results of the election in Congress.
“After it became public on the afternoon of January 6 that the vice president would not fraudulently alter the election results, a large and angry crowd — including many individuals whom the defendant had deceived into believing the vice president could and might change the election results — violently attacked the Capitol and halted the proceeding,” the indictment says.
