August 01, 2023 04:12 PM UTC

The Big One: Trump Indicted Over 2020 Coup Attempt

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• by: Colorado Pols

UPDATE: Donald Trump’s Colorado co-conspirators loom large in today’s indictment:

NEW: The Trump indictment’s “Co-Conspirator 2” appears to be John Eastman, the former CU visiting prof and newly-hired attorney for the @cologop. The description of Co-Conspirator 2’s actions mirrors testimony about Eastman’s role in trying to overthrow the election. #copolitics pic.twitter.com/R2IUkPtLbo

— Kyle Clark (@KyleClark) August 1, 2023

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As the Washington Post reports this afternoon, Stormy Daniels is now the least of ex-President Donald Trump’s problems:

A grand jury has indicted former president Donald Trump for a raft of alleged crimes stemming from his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election…

About 5 p.m., reporters observed a prosecutor with special counsel Jack Smith’s office and the foreperson of a grand jury that has been active for many months examining the events surrounding Jan. 6 deliver the indictment to a magistrate judge in federal court in Washington, D.C.

That grand jury panel gathered Tuesday, and left the courthouse in the afternoon. The indictment is the first known charge or charges to be filed in the special counsel probe of the machinations that led up to the Jan. 6, 2021 riot at the U.S. Capitol, and its aftermath.

The first charges, but very likely not the last:

A key area of interest for Smith has been the conduct of a handful of lawyers who sought to turn Trump’s defeat into victory by trying to convince state, local, federal and judicial authorities that Biden’s 2020 election win was illegitimate or tainted by fraud.

Investigators have sought to determine to what degree these lawyers — particularly Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen and Kenneth Chesebro, as well as then-Justice Department lawyer Jeffrey Clark — were following specific instructions from Trump or others, and what those instructions were…

Colorado-licensed attorney Jenna Ellis was censured by regulators earlier this year as part of an agreement that allowed her to keep her license to practice law in exchange for frank admissions to making “reckless, knowing, or intentional misrepresentations” about the 2020 presidential election. The judge in the case wrote in his opinion that Ellis made these false statements so “with a mental state that was ‘at least reckless,’” and that she “undermined the American public’s confidence in the presidential election.” Rudy Giuliani and former CU conservative scholar John Eastman are both embroiled in disbarment proceedings, with Giuliani’s law license already suspended.

Now it looks like censure and/or disbarment may not be the end of the road for Trump’s Colorado-heavy legal team.

But for today, it’s all about Trump. The previous criminal indictments against Trump over hush money payments to Stormy Daniels, followed by the much more substantive yet still debatable indictments over Trump’s handling of classified documents after leaving office, both pale in terms of historical significance before criminal charges that Trump attempted to overturn American democracy, and remain in office after losing the 2020 presidential election. These are the charges that Americans have waited over two years to see brought while the January 6th rioters Trump incited to violence were methodically pursued and charged for their crimes. With every conviction of a January 6th insurrectionist, the failure to charge the highest levels of the conspiracy became a glaring contradiction.

No longer, folks. We have finally arrived at the moment of accountability the whole world has been waiting for since the violence in the halls of Congress on January 6th, 2021 laid bare the fragility of our democratic institutions. For the sake of the nation’s future, it’s the case among all of these that must not fail.