Consider This from NPR - Latest Trump Indictment Is 'Most Important' One Yet

Episode Date: August 2, 2023

Former President Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday by a federal grand jury on four counts related to the efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, according to court documents.Trump was charged with conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering, conspiracy against the rights of citizens and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding. Special counsel Jack Smith has been leading the investigation into Trump's conduct after the 2020 election and his role in the insurrection that played out at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.We hear from presidential historian Tim Naftali about the significance of the new charges against the former president.In participating regions, you'll also hear a local news segment to help you make sense of what's going on in your community. Email us at [e-mail] more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. A lot of what then-President Trump did in the lead-up to January 6, 2021, he did out in the open. In the weeks after he lost the presidential election, he publicly urged state officials to overturn the results in their states based on lies about election fraud. Very sad to say it, this election was rigged and we can't let that happen. We can't let it happen for our country. And this election has to be turned around because we won Pennsylvania by a lot. That's him calling into a meeting of state Republican lawmakers in Pennsylvania

in November 2020. For the record, Joe Biden won the state. Then there was Trump's speech the morning of the attack on the Capitol. As Congress prepared to count the electoral votes, Trump urged his vice president, Mike Pence, to throw out the results. All Vice President Pence has to do is send it back to the states to recertify, and we become president, and you are the happiest people. He urged a crowd of his supporters to march on the Capitol where they would eventually, violently, overpower police and ransack the building. And we fight. We fight like hell. And if you don't fight like hell,

you're not going to have a country anymore. But in the years since that attack, those same actions have been described in very different terms, depending on who's talking. A month after the insurrection, the Senate's top Republican, Mitch McConnell, had this to say. Former President Trump's actions preceded the riot were a disgraceful, disgraceful dereliction of duty. Trump and his defenders have maintained he did nothing wrong. Here he is on Fox News in December 2021. And if you look at my words and what I said in the speech, they were extremely calming, actually. On August 1st, 2023, a federal grand jury described Trump's role in the attack another

way. Here's special counsel Jack Smith. Today, an indictment was unsealed, charging Donald J. Trump with conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment was issued by a grand jury of citizens here in the District of Columbia, and it sets forth the crimes charged in detail. I encourage everyone to read it in full. Consider this. The indictment unsealed today, filed and described there by special counsel Jack Smith, lays out four felony counts related to the effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election. It's the latest criminal case against the former president. These are the most serious charges yet, and they may be the most challenging to prove.

From NPR, I'm Mary Louise Kelly. It's Tuesday, August 1st. This message comes from WISE, the app for doing things in other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally, and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the WISE app today or visit wise.com. T's and C's apply. This message comes from Indiana University. Indiana University performs breakthrough research every year, making discoveries that improve human health, combat climate change, and move society forward. More at iu.edu forward. This message comes from NBC News. Did you know you can listen to Meet the Press as a podcast? Join moderator Kristen Welker for breaking political news, in-depth analysis, and interviews with leaders and newsmakers. Search for Meet the Press and It's Consider This from NPR. Former President Donald Trump has been indicted again, this time

by a federal grand jury for his role in the insurrection that played out at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th. The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States, witness tampering, attempting to obstruct an official proceeding. The indictment says Trump had six co-conspirators. They are not named. Well, let's quickly refresh ourselves on how we got to this moment. Trump's efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election began almost immediately after Biden was declared the winner. There were lawsuits and press conferences. Here's Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, at Four Seasons Landscaping in Philadelphia. This is outrageous and an enormously important contest with a very, very suspect method of voting. There was no security, zero. And there were phone calls. I just want to find 11,780 votes, which is one more than we have, because we won the state.

By January 6th, with all of his legal challenges exhausted, Trump called his supporters to Washington for a Stop the Steal rally outside the White House. Down the National Mall, lawmakers were gathering in the Capitol building to certify the results of the election. Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down. We're going to walk down. Anyone you want. But I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol.

Trump did not actually walk down with them. He went back inside the White House and watched the ensuing riot unfold on TV. We now know that Trump's aides were pleading with him to call off his supporters as they forced themselves inside the Capitol. Eventually, after several hours, he did, albeit half-heartedly. Go home. We love you. You're very special. You've seen what happens. You see the way others are treated that are so bad and so evil. I know how you feel. But go home and go home in peace.

Then the aftermath. There was an impeachment, Trump's second in as many years. There was a massive congressional investigation, which took 18 months and reviewed more than a million documents. Rioters chanted, hang Mike Pence. The president of the United States, Donald Trump, said that, quote, Mike deserves it. And that those rioters were not doing anything wrong. And then, last November, Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed Jack Smith as special counsel to lead the Department of Justice's investigation into, quote, efforts to interfere with the lawful transfer of power following the 2020 presidential election. So far, the Justice Department has charged more than a thousand people relating

to its January 6th investigations. Up until today, Donald Trump was not one of them. We're going to talk about the significance of a former president of the United States being indicted. To do that, we have brought in presidential historian Tim Naftali. He's a senior research scholar at Columbia University, and we have caught him on the street tonight to react to this news. Tim Naftali, hi. Hi, Mary Louise. So this is the third indictment for former President Trump. Begin by comparing the gravity of these charges to the charges he faces in the Mar-a-Lago case and the charges he's facing in New York for falsifying business records. Okay, well, so first we have to all understand that felonies matter. And so the fact that he's been charged with felonies is important.

I would argue, however, that today's indictment, the indictment regarding January 6th and the Stop the Steal campaign and the former president's alleged role in defrauding the American people, the U.S. government, and depriving people people the right to vote and to have their vote counted, that this is the most important of the three indictments that we have seen thus far. Because it strikes right at the heart of our democracy. It strikes at the core of our constitutional system. The documents indictment is very serious and strikes at the core of our national security system and our ability to keep secrets, to keep our troops and our intelligence professionals safe and to provide the President of the United States with the best information available.

What today's indictment is about is our ability to trust that when we go to vote, our vote is going to be counted and it will matter and that we can trust the outcome of that election as the true reflection of the desires of the Americans who participated in that election. That's about as important an issue for a citizen of a country as I can imagine. So I want to speak to the impact of this on the country, and I want to play a little bit of what special counsel Jack Smith said when he addressed reporters. This was a very, very brief statement, but it included this. In this case, my office will seek a speedy trial so that our evidence can be tested in court and judged by a jury of citizens. In the meantime, I must emphasize that the indictment is only an allegation and that the defendant must be presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt in a court of law. So, Tim Naftali, we just heard the special counsel there saying he's going to

seek a speedy trial. But no matter how speedy it is, it is now coming smack in the midst of a presidential election in which the former president is the front runner for the Republican nomination in the next election. Is there any precedent for that in this country? No, there's no precedent for it. And the former president understood that when he timed his opening announcement of his re-election campaign. You know, he started his re-election campaign earlier than he had actually started his initial campaign for the presidency. So President Trump, I think, has understood all along that one of his best defenses, I think he believes this, is the presumption that any effort to hold him accountable is actually political. So the special prosecutor was reminding all Americans that his objective is not a political trial. It is a fair trial. And a fair trial is a trial where you are innocent

until proven guilty. It's extraordinarily important for us in this era when there's so little trust in our institutions that the trial of a former president be viewed as not only legitimate, but fair. Is there any chance of that happening? That's the question in this political climate. Okay. Well, I fear that there will be a percentage of the electorate that will not view any attempt to hold Donald J. Trump accountable as fair. I think we have to expect that. But there are two other important elements. One is we've seen in poll after poll that there are persuadable Americans. And two, we have to think of our children and our grandchildren and future generations. What would be the cost to our country if we did not seek to hold someone accountable for having allegedly defrauded the U.S. government and more importantly, our ability to trust in an election.

Is that not so important a marker to set by one generation for future generations? I really believe that that is the most important element of this. I have no idea what will happen. And of course, President Trump is innocent until proven guilty. This will be a difficult indictment, I believe, to prove because you're going to have to prove that he knew, that he knowingly knew that his claims were false. And that despite the fact that people told him they're false, that his argument might be, well, I didn't believe them. So the prosecutor is going to have to prove that Donald Trump knew full well that he had lost the 2020 election. Nevertheless, this is such an important moment for us because if we did not,

if with all this evidence, with a mountain of evidence, if this was not taken to a court, many people would wonder if our institutions can protect themselves, if our justice system can survive in a partisan climate. I think this is an important test for us and it's a test we needed, I think, to take. So although many people may not believe,

will never believe that this process was fair for former President Trump, my hope is most Americans will, and even more importantly, that future generations will. Tim Naftali of Columbia University, where he is a presidential historian, and we have been talking about the federal indictment of former President Trump on charges related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Mary Louise Kelly.