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Amy Fried is a political science professor at the University of Maine. Her views are her own and do not represent those of any group with which she is affiliated.
We’ve long known the big picture of what the Jan. 6 federal indictment against Donald Trump is about. Trump tried to thwart the peaceful transfer of power so that he could stay president despite losing the 2020 election.
Detailed evidence shows Trump and his co-conspirators conspired to commit election fraud.
This election fraud was unique because it involved electoral votes. But just as it’s fraud if people plot to dump out ballot boxes and replace real ballots with ballots they manufactured, so is conspiring to replace legitimate electoral votes with counterfeit ones.
Consider all that took place before the real electoral votes were forwarded for Vice President Mike Pence to preside over the count.
People voted. Election officials counted and tallied votes, putting aside ballots with problems to be checked and ultimately included or excluded. Then some states had recounts and election lawsuits. In Georgia alone, Trump’s team brought eight lawsuits (none of which Trump won) and three recounts were done (all of which Biden won).
Then the electors chosen by voters cast their ballots and the official certificates were sent forward.
These processes were set out in laws, which can’t be changed to affect elections after they were held.
Trump and others showed an utter lack of integrity in promulgating their conspiracy, which is set out in the federal indictment.
On Dec. 1, 2020, the speaker of the Arizona House, a Republican, asked Co-Conspirator 1 for evidence of the purported fraud he and Trump claimed made Biden win the state. Co-Conspirator 1 replied with something to the effect of, “We don’t have the evidence, but we have lots of theories,” the indictment states.
A week later a senior campaign advisor informed Co-Conspirator 1 his statements about dead voters in Georgia were untrue, writing, “When our research and campaign legal team can’t back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we’re 0-32 on our cases. I’ll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it’s tough to own any of this when it’s all just conspiracy [stuff] beamed down from the mothership,” the indictment says.
Then, as the indictment states, “On December 13, Co-conspirator 5 sent Co-Conspirator 1 an email memorandum that further confirmed that the conspirators’ plan was not to use the fraudulent electors only in the circumstance that the Defendant’s litigation was successful in one of the targeted states — instead the plan was to falsely present the fraudulent slates as an alternative to the legitimate states at Congress’s certification proceeding.”
On Jan. 1 Pence told Trump that the vice president didn’t have the constitutional authority to do anything but count certified electoral votes. Trump replied, “You’re too honest.”
The next day Trump asked Georgia’s secretary of state “to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have.” This was after all Georgia lawsuits and recounts were finished.
After the insurrection was put down, close to midnight on Jan. 6 Co-Conspirator 2 emailed the vice-president’s counsel to urge Pence to delay certification of the electoral votes, calling this a “relatively minor violation” of the Electoral Count Act, the indictment says.
As they pursued their plot, there was a certain complacency about the possibility of violence to keep Trump in power.
On Jan. 3, the indictment says, Co-Conspirator 4 suggested to a deputy White House counsel that the Insurrection Act — allowing the military to be turned against Americans — could be invoked after Trump stayed in power despite losing.
According to the indictment, on Jan. 4, “when Co-Conspirator 2 acknowledged to [Trump’s] Senior Advisor that no court would support his proposal, the Senior Advisor told Co—Conspirator 2 ‘[Y]ou’re going to cause riots in the streets.’ Co-Conspirator 2 responded that there had been previous points in the nation’s history where violence was necessary to protect the republic.”
On Jan. 5, after Trump told Pence he’d publicly criticize him, Pence’s chief of staff so feared for Pence’s safety he “alerted the head of Pence’s Secret Service detail.”
After the Capitol was violently invaded, Trump took hours to ask the insurrectionists to stop, the indictment reiterates.
We owe a debt of gratitude to Pence and to the brave officers at the Capitol who stopped this attempt to destroy the heart of our constitutional order. Now Trump faces accountability in court.