Grand jury returns an indictment

Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel was in touch with former President Donald Trump when he was moving to initiate a plan to try to overturn the election results, according to the federal indictment against Trump.

The charging document does not name McDaniel outright. But she was the chair of the RNC at the time and continues to lead the committee today.

Trump and an unnamed co-conspirator were in touch with McDaniel “to ensure that the plan was in motion,” the charges allege.

They “told the Chairwoman that it was important for the RNC to help the Defendant’s campaign gather electors in targeted states, and falsely represented to her that such electors’ votes would be used only if ongoing litigation in one of the states changed the results in the Defendant’s favor,” according to the special counsel

“After the RNC Chairwoman consulted the Campaign and heard that work on gathering electors was underway, she called and reported this information to the Defendant, who responded approvingly.”

A spokeswoman for the RNC did not return a request for comment.

– Brian Schwartz

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis lashed out against the federal government and the FBI in response to the indictment of former President Donald Trump.

Yet the Florida governor said he had not yet read the actual indictment against the former president.

DeSantis, Trump’s rival for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said he would “end the weaponization of government” and replace the director of the FBI if he becomes commander in chief.

DeSantis derided Washington, D.C., as a “swamp” and claimed it was unfair for Trump to stand trial “before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality.”

He said cases filed in D.C. should be transferred to a defendant’s home district.

The indictment says Trump enlisted co-conspirators “to assist him in his criminal efforts to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election and retain power.”

Among those were six people, primarily attorneys, whose specific roles, but not names, were detailed in the indictment.

• Co-Conspirator 1 is described in that charging document as “an attorney who was willing to spread knowingly false claims and pursue strategies that the Defendant’s 2020 re-election campaign attorneys would not.”
• Co-Conspirator 2: “An attorney who devised and attempted to implement a strategy to leverage the Vice President’s ceremonial role overseeing the certification proceeding to obstruct the certification of the presidential election.”
• Co-Conspirator 3: “An attorney whose unfounded claims of election fraud the Defendant privately acknowledged to others sounded ‘crazy.’ Nonetheless, the Defendant embraced and publicly amplified Co-Conspirator 3’s disinformation.”
• Co-Conspirator 4: “A Justice Department official who worked on civil matters and who, with the Defendant, attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”
• Co-Conspirator 5: “An attorney who assisted in devising and attempting to implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”
• Co-Conspirator 6: “A political consultant who helped implement a plan to submit fraudulent slates of presidential electors to obstruct the certification proceeding.”

Trump’s election interference case was assigned to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, according to the docket in federal court in Washington, D.C.

Chutkan, 61, was appointed to the district in 2014 by then-President Barack Obama.

She is the only federal judge in D.C. who has delivered sentences against defendants in cases related to the Jan. 6 Capitol riot that are longer than the sentences that the DOJ asked for, according to NBC News.

Chutkan’s assignment offers a contrast from Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump-appointed judge presiding over the former president’s federal classified documents case. Cannon previously caught criticism from legal experts after she delivered rulings that favored Trump in a legal matter related to those classified records.

— Kevin Breuninger

Supporters of former President Donald Trump in Congress rallied to speak out against the new list of indictments.

Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, tweeted Tuesday that Trump “did nothing wrong!”

“When you drain The Swamp, The Swamp fights back,” Jordan added.

GOP Conference Chair Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y., called it “yet another dark day in America” in a scathing statement against the Justice Department and President Joe Biden.

“Today’s sham indictment is yet another desperate attempt to distract attention away from the mounting evidence of Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s illegal peddling scheme — one of the greatest political corruption scandals in history,” Stefanik said, adding that Trump “had every right under the First Amendment to correctly raise concerns about election integrity in 2020.”

—Chelsey Cox

Trump was hit with four serious felonies in the new indictment, accusing him of fraudulently trying to undo his loss in the 2020 election.

The first charge, conspiracy to defraud the United States, has a maximum possible sentence of five years in prison if convicted.

Two other charges — conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and obstruction of an official proceeding — carry much heavier maximums: 20 years in prison.

The fourth charge against Trump, conspiracy against rights, has a maximum possible sentence of 10 years behind bars.

– Dan Mangan

Special counsel Jack Smith will make a statement at 6 p.m. ET, the Department of Justice said.

The DOJ in a tweet shared a link to a video stream.

The rare remarks from the special counsel come less than an hour after the latest charges against Trump were unsealed.

— Kevin Breuninger

The Department of Justice indictment accused Trump of pursuing ways to discount legitimate votes in the 2020 presidential race and subvert the election itself through three criminal conspiracies, a spokesman for the special counsel’s office said in a press release.

The first was a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. “by using dishonesty, fraud and deceit to obstruct the nation’s process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election,” the spokesman said.

The second was “a conspiracy to impede” the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional proceeding where the election results were certified.

The third was “a conspiracy against the right to vote and to have that vote counted,” the spokesman said.

— Kevin Breuninger

Trump has been ordered to appear in Washington, D.C., federal court at 4 p.m., Thursday to face charges in the new indictment, according to the office of special counsel Jack Smith.

Trump’s first appearance in the case will be before Magistrate Judge Moxila Upadhyaya.

– Dan Mangan

The Trump campaign attacked the Biden administration and the Department of Justice in a furious statement after the grand jury investigating interference in the 2020 election handed up an indictment.

The campaign in a statement did not explicitly say that Trump had been indicted in the special counsel’s probe.

Rather, it said, “This is nothing more than the latest corrupt chapter in the continued pathetic attempt by the Biden Crime Family and their weaponized Department of Justice to interfere with the 2024 Presidential Election, in which President Trump is the undisputed frontrunner, and leading by substantial margins.”

“Why did they wait two and a half years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024? Why was it announced the day after the big Crooked Joe Biden scandal broke out from the Halls of Congress?”

Trump himself announced two weeks earlier that he was a target in the investigation.

But his campaign wrote that that “the answer is, election interference!” The statement compared the “persecution” of Trump to the actions of infamous dictatorships including “Nazi Germany in the 1930s.”

“President Trump has always followed the law and the Constitution, with advice from many highly accomplished attorneys,” the statement said.

The campaign predicted that the “un-American witch hunts” against him “will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our Country from the abuse, incompetence, and corruption that is running through the veins of our Country at levels never seen before.”

— Kevin Breuninger

The rally that preceded the riot on Capitol Hill on Jan. 6, 2021 was funded by high-profile Trump donors, like Publix heiress Julia Jenkins Fancelli.

A Fancelli run nonprofit donated $1.3 million in 2020 to Moms for America, a dark money group that sponsored the Jan. 6 rally.Testimony from the House Select Committee ‘s probe into the events on Jan. 6 showed that Fancelli originally proposed a bussing project that would have cost $3 million.

Other dark money groups allied with former President Donald Trump, like Women for America First, helped organize and fund the rally before Trump supporters attacked the Capitol Hill. Dark money groups do not publicly disclose their donors, but Fancelli has previously financed similar groups.

As Congress prepared to certify the Electoral College results and cement Joe Biden’s victory over Trump, the outgoing president encouraged his supporters at the rally to march to the steps of the Capitol and block the process.

– Brian Schwartz

The grand jury known to have been investigating Trump for his efforts to overturn the result of the 2020 presidential election handed up a sealed indictment in Washington, D.C., federal court against an unnamed individual or individuals.

The indictment was handed up minutes after Trump said had heard an indictment against him would be announced at 5 p.m.

– Dan Mangan

More than 1,100 supporters of former President Donald Trump’s have been criminally charged for their participation in the storming of the U.S. Capitol in January 2021.

The cases have been heard by at least 15 judges in the federal district court in Washington, D.C., and more than 550 people have been sentenced, according to the Justice Department.

Sentencing hearings have included remorseful pleas from defendants, many of whom have placed blame on Trump and his rhetoric for inciting them to act.

Speaking at a rally on Jan. 6., 2021, Trump encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol to protest the count of Electoral College votes, a historically ceremonial proceeding to certify the results of a presidential election.

Hours after his supporters stormed the Capitol in a deadly attack, Trump released a video statement from the White House.

“Go home, we love you, you’re very special,” Trump said in the video, addressing the people attacking Congress.

Yet even as he advised them to “go home,” Trump continued to repeat false claims about a stolen election and called his political opponents “evil.”

— Amanda Macias

Trump raged in a second social media post that he apparently would be indicted on the heels of congressional testimony by a former business associate of Hunter Biden, the son of President Biden.

 “Also, why are they putting out another Fake Indictment the day after the Crooked Joe Biden SCANDAL, one of the biggest in American history, broke out in the Halls of Congress???” Trump wrote on his Truth Social site.

“A Nation In Decline!”

Hunter Biden’s business associate Devon Archer gave a transcribed interview to the House Oversight Committee on Monday. Archer reportedly told committee members Hunter put Joe Biden on a speaker phone during business meetings a number of times, but also said that the now-president did not discuss business with his son.

– Dan Mangan