'Justice Must Be Served': Trump Indicted in Push to Overturn 2020 Election

For Rep. Zoe Lofgren, news of Donald Trump’s indictment served as a major vindication of her years-long efforts to hold the former president accountable.

“I do think that the indictment pretty closely tracks the evidence that the Jan. 6 Committee uncovered, and I feel a level of appreciation that our hard work was of value,” the San Mateo Democrat told KQED Tuesday, shortly after Trump was indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.

Lofgren, a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 assault on the U.S. Capitol, underscored the seriousness of the allegations against Trump, and noted this was not an occasion to celebrate.

“At the same time, we can have some satisfaction that the rule of law applies. That it’s not just the foot soldiers that he incited to commit crimes,” she added. “The ex-president was the instigator of this entire plot [and] will be held to account. And I think that’s important for our nation and for the rule of law.”

The four-count indictment from the U.S. Justice Department reveals new details about a dark chapter in modern American history, detailing handwritten notes from former Vice President Mike Pence about Trump’s relentless goading as well as how Trump sought to exploit the violence of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot to remain in office.

Even in a year of rapid-succession legal reckonings for Trump, Tuesday’s criminal case, with charges including conspiring to defraud the United States government that he once led, was especially stunning in its allegations that a former president assaulted the underpinnings of democracy in a frantic but ultimately failed effort to cling to power.

It accuses him of repeatedly lying about the election results, turning aside repeated overtures from some aides to tell the truth but conspiring with others to try to improperly change vote totals in his favor. It says that on the day of the Jan. 6, 2021 riot, he attempted to “exploit” the chaos by pushing to delay the certification of the election results even after the building was cleared of violent protesters.

Trump’s claims of having won the election, said the indictment, were “false, and the Defendant knew they were false. But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Federal prosecutors say Donald Trump was “determined to remain in power” in conspiracies that 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, the third criminal case brought against the former president as he seeks to reclaim the White House in 2024, follows a long-running federal investigation into schemes by Trump and his allies to subvert the peaceful transfer of power and keep him in office despite a decisive loss to Joe Biden.

The mounting criminal cases against Trump — not to mention multiple civil cases — are unfolding in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president.

In New York, state prosecutors have charged Trump with falsifying business records about a hush money payoff to a porn actor before the 2016 election. The trial begins in late March.

In Florida, the Justice Department has brought more than three dozen felony counts against Trump accusing him of illegally possessing classified documents after leaving the White House and concealing them from the government. The trial begins in late May.

The latest federal indictment against Trump focuses heavily on actions taken in Washington, and the trial will be held there, in a courthouse located between the White House he once occupied and the Capitol his supporters once stormed. No trial date has been set.

Prosecutors in Georgia are investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to reverse his election loss to Biden there in 2020. The district attorney of Fulton County is expected to announce a decision on whether to indict the former president in early August.

The investigation of Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election was led by Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith. His team of prosecutors has questioned senior Trump administration officials before a grand jury in Washington, including Pence and top lawyers from the Trump White House.

Rudy Giuliani, a Trump lawyer who pursued post-election legal challenges, spoke voluntarily to prosecutors as part of a proffer agreement, in which a person’s statements can’t be used against them in any future criminal case that is brought.

Prosecutors also interviewed election officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and elsewhere who came under pressure from Trump and his associates to change voting results in states won by Biden, a Democrat.

Focal points of the Justice Department’s election meddling investigation included the role played by some of Trump’s lawyers, post-election fundraising, a chaotic December 2020 meeting at the White House in which some Trump aides discussed the possibility of seizing voting machines and the enlistment of fake electors to submit certificates to the National Archives and Congress falsely asserting that Trump, not Biden, had won their states’ votes.

Reaction among a contingent of Bay Area Democratic leaders was swift and unequivocal. Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Oakland) took to social media to express her strong support for the indictment, stressing that the new charges against Trump “should just be the start.”

“Trump’s 2020 election interference — culminating in January 6th — was the closest any US president has come to disrupting the peaceful transfer of power and ending over two centuries of democracy,” Lee wrote in a tweet. “Justice must be served.”

In a statement on Tuesday afternoon, former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said that as this case proceeds through the courts, justice must be done according to the facts and the law.

“The charges alleged in this indictment are very serious, and they must play out through the legal process, peacefully and without any outside interference,” Pelosi said. “Like every criminal defendant, the former President is innocent until proven guilty. Our Founders made clear that, in the United States of America, no one is above the law — not even the former President of the United States.”

But John Dennis, chairman of the San Francisco Republican Party, said he reacted to the news with “profound sadness.”

“It feels like the legal system and specifically the DOJ have been weaponized against a sitting president,” Dennis said. “That’s something the Democrats decried when Trump was looking into Hunter and Joe Biden in Ukraine, but now they say you shouldn’t go after political opponents in the legal system and they are doing the same thing.”

None of his Republican colleagues “even talks about [Trump’s indictment] at this point,” he added. “Nobody takes any of the charges seriously.”

Trump has been trying to use the mounting legal troubles to his political advantage, claiming without evidence on social media and at public events that the cases are being driven by Democratic prosecutors out to hurt his 2024 election campaign.

The indictments have helped his campaign raise millions of dollars from supporters, though he raised less after the second than the first, raising questions about whether subsequent charges will have the same impact.

A fundraising committee backing Trump’s candidacy began soliciting contributions just hours after the ex-president revealed he was the focus of the Justice Department’s Jan. 6 investigation, casting it as “just another vicious act of Election Interference on behalf of the Deep State to try and stop the Silent Majority from having a voice in your own country.”

Attorney General Merrick Garland last year appointed Smith, an international war crimes prosecutor who also led the Justice Department’s public corruption section, as special counsel to investigate efforts to undo the 2020 election and Trump’s retention of hundreds of classified documents at his Palm Beach, Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. Although Trump has derided him as “deranged” and suggested that he is politically motivated, Smith’s past experience includes overseeing significant prosecutions against high-profile Democrats.

The Justice Department’s investigation into the efforts to overturn the 2020 election began well before Smith’s appointment, proceeding alongside separate criminal probes into the Jan. 6 rioters themselves.

More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the insurrection, including some with seditious conspiracy.

Rep. Adam Schiff (D-Burbank), also a member of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack, told KQED that Tuesday’s indictment closely tracked with his committees’s work, and the evidence that emerged in hearings and in its final report.

“The work had a huge influence on the actions of the Justice Department,” he said. “And it may very well be the Justice Department may not have reached this point of indicting the former president in the absence of our committee’s work.”

Schiff went on to stress the momentousness of the indictment, and the risks it poses to an already extremely politically polarized nation.

“I think the only thing worse, more dangerous than charging a candidate for president or former president is not charging them when they’ve committed a crime,” he said. “And so this is a necessary part of our democracy. We’re going to have to go through this as a country. It’ll be yet another test of the strength of our institutions.

This story includes reporting from KQED’s Steph Rodriguez, Natalia Navarro, Matthew Green and Sydney Johnson.