Prosecutors filed this Tuesday a reformulated indictment against Donald Trump, insisting on charges that he tried to alter the outcome of the 2020 US presidential election after losing to Joe Biden.
According to the criteria of
The new indictment maintains the same four crimes against the Republican as the previous one, but takes into account a recent Supreme Court ruling that grants a former president broad immunity from criminal prosecution.
The revised indictment, which runs to 36 pages instead of the previous 45, removes the parts that would be potentially affected by the ruling on presidential immunity by the high court, which is made up of a majority of conservative judges.
Maintains the essential and affirms that Trump lost in 2020 but was “determined to stay in power” and tried to alter the results.
What’s next?
The Supreme Court ruled in July that a former president has broad immunity from criminal prosecution for official acts performed while in office, but can be prosecuted for unofficial acts.
This cast doubt on the former president’s prosecution.
The indictment leaves up in the air whether special counsel Jack Smith, who brought the charges against Trump, and the former president’s lawyers will release a timetable for pretrial proceedings, as they were expected to do in three days.
It is also unclear whether Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over the case, will hold a preliminary hearing on September 5.
Trump’s defense has sought to delay the trial until after the November presidential election, in which the former tycoon is the Republican Party’s candidate against Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat.
Trump is accused of conspiring to defraud the United States and obstructing an official proceeding: the session of Congress on January 6, 2021, which could not be held due to the violent intrusion of supporters of the former president.
He is also accused of attempting to disenfranchise American voters with a campaign of false claims that he won the 2020 election.
The trial was initially scheduled for March 4, but was suspended after his lawyers filed a presidential immunity suit with the Supreme Court.
Chutkan, an appointee of former Democratic President Barack Obama, will decide which of Trump’s actions in the 2020 election were official acts and which were not.
This and other preliminary issues are expected to take months to resolve, making it unlikely the case will go to trial before the November 5 presidential election.
Special prosecutor Jack Smith on Monday asked a U.S. federal appeals court to overturn a judge’s ruling that dismissed charges against former President Donald Trump for taking confidential documents with him when he left the White House. Even if the court rules in Smith’s favor, a potential trial of Trump could not take place before the Nov. 5 election.
What Trump said
Former US President and Republican candidate Donald Trump (2017-2021) on Tuesday called the new accusation against him in Washington in the case of the assault on the Capitol ridiculous and said it should be dismissed.
Trump said on his social network, Truth Social, that the special prosecutor leading the investigation, the “deranged” Jack Smith, had filed this “ridiculous” accusation against him “in an effort to resurrect a ‘dead’ witch hunt in Washington DC, in an act of desperation and to save face.”
Smith has redone his indictment against the New York magnate, maintaining the four previous charges but toning down the allegations to conform to the Supreme Court’s ruling on Trump’s immunity for official acts as president.
“This is simply an attempt to INTERFERE WITH THE ELECTION and distract the American people from the catastrophes that Kamala Harris has inflicted on our nation, such as the border invasion, immigrant crime, rampant inflation, the threat of World War III and more…”, Trump stressed on Truth Social.
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