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Special Counsel Revises Trump Election Indictment to Address Immunity Ruling
Jack Smith’s filing, in the case charging the former president with plotting to overturn the 2020 election, came in response to the Supreme Court’s ruling giving former presidents broad immunity.
Federal prosecutors on Tuesday issued a revised version of an indictment accusing former President Donald J. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election, stripping out some charges in order to help it survive the Supreme Court’s recent ruling granting former presidents broad immunity for official acts in office.
The new indictment came just days before Mr. Trump’s lawyers and prosecutors in the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, were scheduled to provide the judge overseeing the case with their separate proposals for how to assess the impact on the case of the Supreme Court’s immunity decision.
It was not immediately clear how the new indictment would affect how that assessment will now move forward.
Read the Revised Indictment in the Federal Election Subversion Case
Federal prosecutors issued another version of an indictment accusing former President Donald J. Trump of plotting to overturn the 2020 election after the Supreme Court granted former presidents broad immunity for official acts.
Read DocumentPerhaps the most significant change between the 36-page superseding indictment and the original 45-page indictment was that Mr. Smith’s deputies removed all the allegations concerning Mr. Trump’s attempts to strong-arm the Justice Department into supporting his false claims that the election had been rigged against him.
The initial charging document accused Mr. Trump of conspiring with Jeffrey Clark, a loyalist within the Justice Department who had promised to launch investigations into election fraud even though other top-ranking department officials had warned him against it.
In its decision on immunity, however, the Supreme Court ruled that Mr. Trump could not face criminal charges related to any of his interactions with Justice Department officials, finding that a president’s dealings with the department were part of the core official duties of his office.
Still, much of the old indictment remained untouched as Mr. Smith’s team came out with its new one. Mr. Trump faces the same four charges, accused of overlapping conspiracies to defraud the United States, to obstruct the certification of the election at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, and to deprive millions of Americans of their rights to have their votes counted.
The revised indictment also retained several of the alleged plots that appeared in the initial charging document.
Mr. Trump still stands accused of working with his subordinates to create fake slates of electors claiming that he won the election in several key swing states that were actually won by President Biden. He is also still facing charges related to his efforts to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence, into throwing the election his way during the Jan. 6 certification proceeding at the Capitol.
Alan Feuer covers extremism and political violence for The Times, focusing on the criminal cases involving the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and against former President Donald J. Trump. More about Alan Feuer
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