This was saying these are legitimate electors even though they had not been chosen through the official procedures, they had not been certified by the governors, but they were showing up and purporting to be something they were not.Īnd the fact that they were showing up and the idea was that Pence would either count them instead or use their presence as an excuse to stop the proceedings, send the stuff back to the states, was going to obstruct, disrupt, impair Congress from getting through its joint session to count the electoral votes. ![]() One way of looking at that is this was defrauding the government. They’re independent criminal lenses to bring upon the same set of actions.įor example, recruiting slates of fraudulent electors to send to Washington and appear alongside the actual state-certified electors that Biden won from these swing states, like Georgia, Arizona, and so forth. So the three statutes that are charged - conspiracy to defraud the government, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, and then closely related actual obstruction and attempts at obstruction, and then finally a conspiracy to disenfranchise voters are all different ways of looking at this same story. And just remind us how this grand narrative, this one big story in the eyes of Jack Smith, the Special Counsel, merits the charges that are included in it. And so they’re putting the everything into these different pots rather than breaking it up into discrete segments. It’s like the entire narrative can be charged this way, can be charged that way, is chargeable this other way. And the same set of facts are being looked at from each of these criminal perspectives. And it says that entire narrative the fraudulent electors in the different states pressuring the Justice Department to say there was fraud when they weren’t seeing it, pressuring Mike Pence to disrupt the counting of Biden’s electoral votes on January 6, and so forth.Īll of that adds up to three different criminal statutes from which they have four counts. It is a long narrative about all the myriad ways that Trump and his accused co-conspirators tried to engineer a way for him to stay in power despite losing the 2020 election. You’re right that it is not the standard indictment where you have a few discrete actions, and then that’s attached to one charge and then there’s some different actions and that’s attached to a different charge. So I do think that we can infer some insights into what strategy Jack Smith is developing here from the structure of this indictment. What that structure tells us about the legal strategy behind this indictment? charlie savage This grand story means he committed all these alleged crimes. Instead, it just tells one big long story about what Trump did and his efforts, allegedly, to overturn the 2020 election and says, trust us. Just to remind listeners, it does not this indictment lay out a bunch of charges and then evidence that would back up those charges. And when this indictment came out last week, the first thing we all noticed about it was how it was structured. I want to start by talking about the legal strategy behind this latest indictment of former President Trump and its strengths and its weaknesses. We like to turn to you as The Times in-house legal mind after indictments Because you make sense of them. My colleague, Charlie Savage, has been studying last week’s indictment to better understand Smith’s legal strategy, and the ways that Trump may try to counter it.Ĭharlie, welcome back. Today, to win a conviction against Donald Trump for trying to subvert the 2020 election, Special Counsel, Jack Smith, is applying laws in ways they’ve never been used before. michael barbaroįrom New York Times, I’m Michael Barbaro. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email with any questions. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. ![]() This transcript was created using speech recognition software. ![]() ![]() Transcript The Legal Strategy Behind the Latest Trump Indictment A look at the strengths and weaknesses of the special counsel’s tactics - and at how Donald Trump’s defense might proceed.
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