Special Counsel Jack Smith has indicted Donald Trump again, this time over the January 6 debacle, which has been overblown and overhyped to death in the liberal press. Spencer wrote about it, including the four charges Trump now faces in this investigation:
A federal grand jury empaneled in Washington, D.C. returned a new indictment on Tuesday evening in its ongoing investigation of the events following the 2020 election, including the events of and leading up to January 6, 2021.
But the grand jury's indictment delivered to a judge on Tuesday remained sealed, the indictment — obtained by Townhall — confirms that Donald J. Trump is the defendant.
The indictment lists four violations of which the 45th president is being accused:
Count 1: Conspiracy to Defraud the United States
Count 2: Conspiracy to Obstruct an Official Proceeding
Count 3: Obstruction of and Attempt to Obstruct an Official Proceeding
Count 4: Conspiracy Against Rights
George Washington University Law School professor Jonathan Turley has posted at length about the perils of indicting Trump, namely that most of the charges he could face would be protected by the First Amendment, though he added that the temptation to indict Trump in DC—an anti-Trump bastion—might prove “irresistible” for the Justice Department. He was right, along with the free speech concerns, too.
Here's what NBC News said about one of the charges:
Former President Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday on charges he conspired to defraud the country he used to lead and attempted to prevent the peaceful transfer of presidential power to Joe Biden.
“The purpose of the conspiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud to obstruct the government function by which those results are collected, counted and certified,” the indictment from special counsel Jack Smith’s office says.
[…]
The indictment accuses Trump of taking part in three criminal conspiracies: "to defraud the United States by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit" to obstruct the electoral vote process; to "impede the January 6 congressional proceeding at which the collected results of the presidential election are counted and certified;" and "against the right to vote and to have that vote counted."
He's due to be arraigned on the charges on Thursday.
The issue here is that there has been a slew of Democratic senators who have made similar points in fruitless attempts to challenge an election. We’ve seen this since at least 2004. According to Turley, the legal maneuver with the electors Trump tried to pull was bad legal advice, but that’s also not illegal. He further eviscerated the charges on Twitter:
Special Counsel Jack Smith just issued the first criminal indictment of alleged disinformation in my view. If you take a red pen to all of the material presumptively protected by the First Amendment, you can reduce much of the indictment to haiku...
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
...The press conference held by Smith only deepened the unease for some of us. Smith railed against the January 6th riot and made it sound like he was indicting Trump on incitement. He didn't. The disconnect was glaring and concerning.
— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) August 1, 2023
And the law professor warned that Smith has a history of stretching criminal statutes to the limits of their sanity. He also said that if an indictment over January 6 was filed, Smith's case better be ironclad as the public is now starting to see these legal actions as driven by politics (they are) and not the rule of law.
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