Former President Donald Trump’s prediction from earlier this week has come true.
On Monday, Trump predicted that a federal indictment from the Department of Justice would be handed down “any day now,” following the investigation that special counsel Jack Smith conducted into the former president’s role in trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
That prediction came true just one day later, when Trump was formally indicted on four counts related to the investigation.
On Monday, Trump posted on his Truth Social page:
“I assume that an Indictment from Deranged Jack Smith and his highly partisan gang of Thugs, pertaining to my ‘PEACEFULLY & PATRIOTICALLY Speech,’ will be coming out any day now, as yet another attempt to cover up all of the bad news about bribes, payoffs, and extortion, coming from the Biden ‘camp.’ This seems to be the way they do it. ELECTION INTERFERENCE! PROSECUTORIAL MISCONDUCT!”
The indictment went into detail alleging that Trump helped lead a “campaign of lies” for months regarding the results of the 2020 election, even after all the falsehoods he was spewing ended up, in part, resulting in the Capitol insurrection in January of 2021.
In fact, the indictment further states that Trump even exploited all the violence that happened that day, using it to show why the certification of the election results needed to be delayed even more.
In announcing the indictment on Tuesday, Smith said in a statement:
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. It was fueled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”
The indictment listed six other co-conspirators, all of whose names were redacted, but none of them have been formally charged thus far. Several media outlets have connected the dots to most of those co-conspirators, which included lawyers who served both outside and inside of the federal government, including Rudy Giuliani.
After the indictment was handed down, the Trump campaign immediately called the charges against the former president “fake,” questioning why it took more than two years for the Department of Justice to finally bring the charges.
The first step in the legal process for this case is the formal arraignment, which was set for Thursday. It will take place at a federal courthouse in Washington, D.C.
In the indictment, prosecutors say that the former president fully knew the claims he was making about him winning the presidential election were false. Still, he “repeated and widely disseminated them anyway – to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
Among the charges against Trump are conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and conspiracy to defraud the United States.
He’s also charged under a civil rights law that was passed after the Reconstruction Era that makes it illegal to conspire to violate any rights that the Constitution guarantees. In this case, the one that was allegedly violated was the right to vote.
