Trump’s third indictment is “exponentially more momentous, in that it aims to hold legally accountable a President who tried to undo a free and fair Presidential election,” JeannieSGersen writes.
The indictment includes four felony counts: conspiracy to defraud the United States, by attempting to overturn the election results; conspiracy to violate civil rights, namely citizens’ rights to vote and to have their votes counted; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding, that is, the congressional certification of the electoral vote; and the actual obstruction of that proceeding.
Yet a paradoxical effect of reading through the grimly repetitive march of person after person who told Trump that he had lost is that it underscores his stubborn refusal to let go of the belief that he had won. Smith faces the possibility that at least one juror will accept that Trump’s belief was sincere, thus producing a reasonable doubt as to his subjective intent.
A more tricky hurdle for Smith is the fact that Trump’s co-conspirators are mostly lawyers on whose advice—including in a legal memo from Eastman, laying out the possibility that Pence could refuse to certify the election—Trump was allegedly acting. Following the advice of an attorney who purports to be providing legal counsel, even if it turns out to be wrong, can insulate a defendant from liability, to some degree.
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