Former president Trump has finally been indicted for his role in efforts to fraudulently overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, and everyone's picking over the documentation for juicy details. From CNN's summary:
In the hours before the Capitol attack, Trump also repeated the false claim that there had been more than 200,000 illegal votes in Pennsylvania, despite Justice Department officials telling him multiple times the claim was false.
In Michigan, Trump had said multiple times there was an illegal dump of votes in Detroit in the middle of the night during the 2020 election, despite Republican state leaders at the time telling Trump he was wrong and had lost the state because he "had had underperformed with certain voter populations in the state," the indictment says.
The indictment cites instances where Trump was informed that his claims were false by Vice President Mike Pence, the director of national intelligence, senior members of the Justice Department, the Department of Homeland Security's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, his own staffers, state lawmakers as well as state and federal courts.
My favorite, though, is this detail on the plan to keep Trump in office after Jan. 20, knowing that there would be widespread protests:
Read more on the Insurrection Act. "Violence necessary to protect the republic," as an unnamed co-conspirator put it.
Trump vice president Mike Pence, not particularly energetic or credible in his run for the job against his old boss, nonetheless took today's indictments as an opportunity to sharpen his words:
"Today's indictment serves as an important reminder: anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States."
