August 2 – Donald Trump has been indicted on felony charges for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy, said AP on Wednesday.
The four-count indictment, the third criminal case against Trump, provided deeper insight into a dark moment that has already been the subject of exhaustive federal investigations and captivating public hearings. It chronicles a months-long campaign of lies about the election results and says that, even when those falsehoods resulted in a chaotic insurrection at the Capitol, Trump sought to exploit the violence by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump.
But earlier Former US President Trump has denied wrongdoing in a growing criminal case into his handling of classified material, hours after United States prosecutors filed new charges accusing the former US president of obstruction of justice.
In an interview last Friday with conservative radio host John Fredericks, Trump dismissed allegations that he ordered an employee at his Mar-A-Lago resort in Florida to delete security camera footage sought by the Department of Justice. “These were security tapes. We handed them over to them … I’m not even sure what they’re saying,” Trump said.
US Special Counsel Jack Smith filed three new criminal charges against Trump last Thursday, and charged a Mar-a-Lago maintenance worker, 56-year-old Carlos De Oliveira, with obstruction of justice, among other counts.
The new charges add to Trump’s long list of legal troubles and investigations, but the Republican presidential frontrunner said on Friday that he would push forward with his campaign even if he were found guilty and sentenced.
“Not at all. There’s nothing in the Constitution to say that it could,” he told Fredericks when asked if sentencing would put an end to his 2024 campaign. /argumentum.al
