FORMER US President Donald Trump has been charged with illegal plotting to overturn his 2020 election defeat. He is accused of four counts including conspiracy to defraud the US, tampering with a witness and conspiracy against the rights of citizens.
The indictment caps an inquiry into events surrounding the 6 January 2021 attack on the US Capitol. Trump, 77, who is again running for president, denies wrongdoing. On social media he called the case ‘ridiculous’.
The election investigation has focused on Trump’s actions in the two-month period between his loss to Joe Biden and the riot in Washington DC, where his supporters stormed Congress as lawmakers certified the Democrat’s victory.
The man leading the inquiry, special counsel Jack Smith, said: ‘The attack on our nation’s capital on January 6 2021 was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment it was fuelled by lies.’
Smith wrapped up his brief statement by pledging to seek ‘a speedy trial’, while emphasising that the former president ‘must be assumed innocent until proven guilty.’
Trump is due to appear in court today in Washington DC. The 45-page indictment lists six unnamed co-conspirators: four lawyers, a justice department official and a political consultant.
The court document accuses Trump of a ‘conspiracy to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function through dishonesty, fraud and deceit’.
Addressing Trump’s allegations of voter fraud in 2020, prosecutors say: ‘These claims were false and the defendant knew that they were false. As violence ensued, the defendant and co-conspirators exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince members of Congress to further delay the certification based on those claims.’
Trump, who now faces 78 criminal counts overall in three different cases, is currently the frontrunner in the Republican Party’s contest to pick its next presidential candidate.
Whoever wins will challenge the Democratic nominee, expected to be President Biden, in November 2024.
Trump will have three criminal trials to attend in the next 12 to 18 months, complicating his second run for the White House. But the Trump campaign said in a statement that Tuesday’s indictment amounted to election interference.
It added: ‘These un-American witch-hunts will fail.’
Democratic leaders in Congress issued a joint statement which said: ‘This indictment is the most serious and most consequential thus far, and will stand as a stark reminder to generations of Americans that no one, including a president of the United States, is above the law.’
A decision by prosecutors in Atlanta on whether to indict Trump is expected this month. In his defence, Trump has spoken up and made allegations about President Biden and what he terms as the ‘Biden crime family’. He is referring to Hunter Biden’s work in the Ukraine banks in the period before the right wing coup.
In fact from 2013 through 2018 Hunter Biden and his company brought in about $11 million via his roles as an attorney and a board member with a Ukrainian firm, accused of bribery, and his work with a Chinese businessman now accused of fraud.
This is according to an NBC News analysis of a copy of Biden’s hard drive and iCloud account and documents released by Republicans on two Senate committees.
The documents and the analysis, which don’t show what he did to earn millions from his Chinese partners, raise questions about national security, business ethics and potential legal exposure.
In December 2020, Hunter Biden acknowledged in a statement that he was the subject of a federal investigation into his taxes. NBC News was first to report that an ex-business partner had warned him that he should amend his tax returns to disclose $400,000 in income from the Ukrainian firm, Burisma.
‘No government ethics rules apply to him,’ said Walter Shaub, a former director of the US Office of Government Ethics who is now an ethics expert with the Project on Government Oversight.
Frank Figliuzzi, the FBI’s former assistant director for counter intelligence, said there is a national security risk when foreign powers like China see an opportunity to get close to someone like Biden. Hunter Biden made $5.8 million, more than half his total earnings from 2013 to 2018, from two deals with Chinese business interests.
The US working class faces massive attacks on its wages and conditions as the US banking system collapses. Both wings of the US bosses, and their political parties, are its enemy.
The US workers must break with the bourgeois parties and set up a Labour Party, and build a section of the Fourth International in the USA to lead it in organising the American socialist revolution, to liberate the US and world working class from the grip of US imperialism.