OAN’s Brooke Mallory
4:39 PM – Tuesday, August 1, 2023
45th President Donald Trump was indicted by Special Counsel Jack Smith on Tuesday in connection with alleged intentions to overturn his election loss to Joe Biden in 2020.
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The allegations are the former president’s third criminal indictment since launching his run for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024.
Special Counsel Jack Smith handled the election inquiry as well as a separate investigation into Trump’s alleged retention of confidential papers at his Mar-a-Lago property after leaving the White House in 2021.
Trump was reportedly charged with 37 counts in June in connection with his alleged efforts to conceal such documents from authorities.
However, Trump has adamantly denied any purposeful intention to hide documents and also maintains that he handed over Mar-a-Lago tapes to prosecutors in order to prove that there was no deletion of any evidence.
In a separate case, Trump pleaded not guilty and is expected to stand trial in May.
According to the newest indictment charges against Trump, then-Vice President Mike Pence took “contemporaneous notes” of meetings with Trump as the then-vice president intended to stay in office until early 2021. Special Counsel Jack Smith received those recordings.
The indictment mentions a meeting on January 4th, 2021, involving Trump, Pence, Pence’s chief of staff and his legal counsel.
“During the meeting, as reflected in the Vice President’s contemporaneous notes, the Defendant made knowingly false claims of election fraud, including, ‘Bottom line — won every state by 100,000s of votes’ and ‘We won every state,’ and asked — regarding a claim his senior Justice Department officials previously had told him was false, including as recently as the night before— ‘What about 205,000 votes more in PA than voters?”
In the indictment details, Pence “challenged” co-conspirator 2, an attorney who presented a strategy for Pence to reject or dispute seven states’ Electoral College slates, possibly pushing the question of which candidates’ electoral slates would be valid back to individual states.
According to Eastman’s own legal counsel, co-conspirator 2 is the lawyer John Eastman.
“When the Vice President challenged Co-Conspirator 2 on whether the proposal to return the question to the states was defensible, Co-Conspirator 2 responded, ‘Well, nobody’s tested it before,’ “the indictment stated.
“The Vice President then told the Defendant, ‘Did you hear that? Even your own counsel is not saying I have that authority,’” it continued. “The Defendant responded, ‘That’s okay, I prefer the other suggestion’ of the Vice President rejecting the electors unilaterally.”
Jack Smith claimed that the strike on January 6th, 2021, was an “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy.”
According to the special counsel, it was “fueled by lies. Lies by the defendant, targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government,” he continued.
Smith also appeared to dismiss previous protests, like those organized by BLM or Antifa, which resulted in far more violence, fatalities, and destruction to a number of communities, since they had no relation to Trump or his Republican presidential bid.
The Special Counsel spoke for around three minutes, and he refused to answer any questions.
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