Trump IndictmentJan. 6 Riot Was ‘Fueled by Lies’ From Trump, Special Counsel Says

 Trump IndictmentJan. 6 Riot Was ‘Fueled by Lies’ From Trump, Special Counsel Says

Former President Donald J. Trump was charged with four counts in connection with his efforts to subvert the will of voters in 2020. “Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” prosecutors wrote.

Former President Donald J. Trump was indicted on Tuesday in connection with his widespread efforts to overturn the 2020 election following a sprawling federal investigation into his attempts to cling to power after losing the presidency.

The indictment, filed by the special counsel Jack Smith in Federal District Court in Washington, accuses Mr. Trump of three conspiracies: one to defraud the United States; a second to obstruct an official government proceeding, the certification of the Electoral College vote; and a third to deprive people of a civil right, the right to have their votes counted. Mr. Trump was also charged with a fourth count of obstructing or attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election,” the indictment said.

The charges signify an extraordinary moment in United States history: a former president, in the midst of a campaign to return to the White House, being charged over attempts to use the levers of government power to subvert democracy and remain in office against the will of voters.

In sweeping terms, the indictment described how Mr. Trump and six co-conspirators employed a variety of means to reverse his defeat in the election almost from the moment that voting ended.

It depicted how Mr. Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it described how he ultimately pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to use the fake electors to subvert the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol.

The indictment did not name the alleged co-conspirators, but the descriptions of their behavior match publicly known episodes involving prominent people around Mr. Trump.

The behavior of “Co-conspirator 1” appears to align with that of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer whom he put in charge of efforts to deny the transfer of power after his main campaign lawyers made clear it was over. Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, acknowledged in a statement that it “appears that Mayor Giuliani is alleged to be co-conspirator No. 1.”

The description of “Co-conspirator 2” tracks closely with that of John Eastman, a California law professor who served as the architect of the plan to pressure Mr. Pence.

The co-conspirators could be charged at any point, and their inclusion in the indictment — even unnamed — places pressure on them to cooperate with investigators.

Many of the details in the charges were familiar, having appeared either in news accounts or in the work of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. There were descriptions of Mr. Trump’s attempt to install a loyalist, Jeffrey Clark, who appears to be a co-conspirator in the case, atop the Justice Department and to strong-arm the secretary of state of Georgia into finding him enough votes to win the election in that state.

There were also references to Mr. Trump posting a message on Twitter in mid-December 2020 calling for a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, and to him pressuring Mr. Pence to try to throw the election his way during the joint session of Congress that day.

But the indictment also contained some snippets of new information, such as a description of Mr. Trump telling Mr. Pence, “You’re too honest,” as the vice president pushed back on Mr. Trump’s pressure to interfere in the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.

It also included an account of Mr. Trump telling someone who asked if he wanted additional pressure put on Mr. Pence that “no one” else but him needed to speak with the vice president.

Mr. Smith, in drafting his charging document, walked a cautious path in connecting Mr. Trump to the mob attack on the Capitol. The indictment mentioned Mr. Trump’s “exploitation of the violence and chaos” at the building that day, but did not accuse him of inciting the riot.

It also laid out how Mr. Trump was repeatedly told by multiple people, including top officials in his campaign and at the Justice Department, that he had lost the election and that his claims that he had been cheated were false. That sort of evidence could help prosecutors prove their accusations by establishing Mr. Trump’s intent.

Mr. Trump’s constant claims of widespread election fraud “were false, and the defendant knew they were false,” the indictment said, adding that he was told repeatedly that his assertions were untrue.

“Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment said.

Mr. Trump has been summoned for his initial court appearance in the case on Thursday afternoon before a magistrate judge in Federal District Court in Washington, the special counsel’s office said. Ultimately, a trial date and a schedule for pretrial motions will be set, proceedings that are likely to extend well into the presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer on the case, John Lauro, laid out what appeared to be the beginning of his defense, telling Fox News, “I would like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations” about voter fraud “were false.”

The charges in the case came more than two and a half years after a pro-Trump mob — egged on by incendiary speeches by Mr. Trump and his allies — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in the worst attack on the seat of Congress since the War of 1812.

They also came a little more than seven months after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Smith, a career federal prosecutor, to oversee both the election tampering and classified documents inquiries into Mr. Trump. They followed a series of high-profile hearings last year by the House Jan. 6 committee, which laid out extensive evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election results.

Mr. Garland moved to name Mr. Smith as special counsel in November, just days after Mr. Trump declared that he was running for president again.

In a brief appearance before reporters, Mr. Smith set out what he said was the former president’s moral, as well as legal, responsibility for violence at the Capitol, saying the riot was “fueled by lies” — Mr. Trump’s lies.

Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, has incorporated attacking the investigations into his campaign messaging and fund-raising. His advisers have been blunt in private conversations that they see his winning the election as crucial to undoing the charges against him.

In a statement, Mr. Trump denounced the indictment.

“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?” he said, calling it “election interference” and comparing the Biden administration to Nazi Germany.

The judge assigned to Mr. Trump’s case, Tanya S. Chutkan, has been a tough jurist in cases against Jan. 6 rioters — and in a case that involved Mr. Trump directly. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she has routinely issued harsh penalties against people who stormed the Capitol.

She also denied Mr. Trump’s attempt to avoid disclosing documents to the Jan. 6 committee, ordering him to turn over the material and writing, “Presidents are not kings.”

Mr. Trump now faces two separate federal indictments. In June, Mr. Smith brought charges in Florida accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to a highly sensitive trove of national defense documents and then obstructing the government’s attempts to get them back.

The scheme charged by Mr. Smith on Tuesday in the election case played out largely in the two months between Election Day in 2020 and the attack on the Capitol. During that period, Mr. Trump took part in a range of efforts to retain power despite having lost the presidential race.

In addition to federal charges in the election and documents cases, Mr. Trump also faces legal troubles in state courts.

He has been charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a case that centers on hush money payments made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his election loss are also the focus of a separate investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga. That inquiry appears likely to generate charges this month.

It seems likely that Mr. Trump will face the prospect of at least three criminal trials next year, even as he is campaigning for the presidency. The Manhattan trial is scheduled to begin in March, while the federal documents case in Florida is set to go to trial in May.

Jack Smith made only his second televised appearance as special counsel on Tuesday to explain his decision to charge former President Donald J. Trump with leading a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election.

He took no questions and urged viewers to read the 45-page indictment in its entirety.

The indictment of the former president for trying to subvert democracy — an episode that has no precedent in American history — was issued by a federal grand jury in Washington and unsealed shortly before Mr. Smith gave his statement.

Mr. Trump has been charged with four crimes, including conspiracies to defraud the United States and to obstruct an official proceeding.

Here are four takeaways:

The indictment portrays an attack on American democracy.

Mr. Smith framed his case against Mr. Trump as one that cuts to a core function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.

By underscoring this theme, which he also laid out in the indictment, Mr. Smith cast his effort as not just an effort to hold Mr. Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.

Mr. Smith said the former president’s efforts to overturn the election went well beyond his First Amendment right to make claims about voter fraud. The indictment details Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the machinery of government — including his own Justice Department — to help him cling to power.

Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy.

Mr. Smith puts Mr. Trump at the heart of three overlapping conspiracies: a conspiracy to “defraud the United States” in his efforts to subvert the results of the 2020 election; a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct” the counting and certification of election results on Jan. 6; and a conspiracy to disenfranchise American voters by trying to override legitimate votes.

These overlapping conspiracies culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, when the so-called fake electors, the pressure on then-Vice President Mike Pence and the riot at the Capitol all converged to obstruct Congress’s function in ratifying the Electoral College outcome.

Mr. Smith argued in the indictment that Mr. Trump knew his claims about a stolen election were false. He cited a litany of episodes in which campaign advisers, White House officials, top Justice Department lawyers, speakers of statehouses and election administrators all told Mr. Trump his claims about “outcome-determinative fraud” in the election were false. Mr. Trump nonetheless kept repeating them.

Establishing that Mr. Trump knew he was lying could be important to convincing a jury to convict him. A lawyer for Mr. Trump has already signaled that his defense could rest in part on showing that he truly believed he had been cheated out of re-election.

Trump didn’t do it alone.

The indictment lists six co-conspirators, without naming or indicting them.

Based on the descriptions provided of the co-conspirators, they match the profiles of a crew of outside lawyers and advisers that Mr. Trump turned to after his campaign and White House lawyers failed to turn up credible evidence of fraud and had lost dozens of cases to challenge the election results in swing states.

After many of his core advisers told him his claims of fraud weren’t bearing out, Mr. Trump turned to lawyers who were willing to argue ever more outlandish conspiracy theories and to devise edge-of-the-envelope legal theories to keep him in power.

These advisers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York; the constitutional lawyer John Eastman, who came up with the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence to block the certification of election results on Jan. 6; and Sidney Powell, the lawyer who pushed the theory that foreign nations had hacked into voting machines and flipped votes to Joseph R. Biden Jr. Even Mr. Trump told advisers at the time that Ms. Powell’s theories sounded “crazy,” but he kept repeating them in public.

It’s unclear whether any or all of these co-conspirators will be indicted or whether they now have a period in which there’s an opportunity for them to decide to cooperate with prosecutors.

Indictments have only strengthened Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.

Mr. Trump may be on trial next year in three or four separate criminal cases — and there’s no telling what effect that might have on his general election prospects if he’s the Republican nominee. But in the short term, the indictments so far appear to have had nothing but political upside for the former president.

All evidence leads to a fact that would have been unbelievable in the pre-2015 Republican Party: In part by allowing him to claim that he is the victim of politicized prosecution by the Biden administration and liberal foes in New York and Georgia, the criminal investigations have helped consolidate Mr. Trump’s position as his party’s overwhelming front-runner in the presidential primaries.

Tuesday’s was Mr. Trump’s third indictment since early April. In the four months since his first indictment in New York, Mr. Trump has gained nearly 10 percentage points in national polling averages. During that same period, his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has seen his support collapse to the point where he now lags Mr. Trump nationally by more than 30 percentage points and is far behind in all the early voting states.

To understand the depths of frustration that Mr. Trump’s presidential rivals are wallowing in as they helplessly watch a Republican electorate in thrall to the former president, consider a single data point from this week’s New York Times/Siena College poll.

“In a head-to-head contest with Mr. DeSantis,” The Times wrote, “Mr. Trump still received 22 percent among voters who believe he has committed serious federal crimes — a greater share than the 17 percent that Mr. DeSantis earned from the entire G.O.P. electorate.”

If Mr. Trump does well among Republican voters who already think he’s a criminal, what hope do his G.O.P. opponents have of exploiting this latest indictment?