The Absolutely Wildest Details of the Government’s Latest Indictment Against Trump

By now you’ve no doubt heard that on Tuesday, Donald Trump notched his third indictment in the span of nearly four months when he was charged by the Justice Department for his plot to overturn the 2020 election. While most people will recall many of the steps Trump took to stay in power in the weeks following his loss to Joe Biden—ballot-switching Italian satellites, anyone?—the 45-page indictment unveiled by special counsel Jack Smith and his team of prosecutors lays out in granular detail the ex-president’s scheme to steal a second term. Though certain individuals have claimed that Trump believed his own lies, the indictment makes the case that, in reality, he knew they were bullshit and sold them to the public anyway in an attempt to overturn a free and fair election.

Obviously, the whole thing is incredibly bad for Trump—not from a political standpoint, given that indictments only improve his standing among Republicans,* but from the one wherein he faces literal decades in prison should he be convicted on all counts. Still, some aspects of the indictment seem extra, extra bad for him.

Things like:

The conversation with Mike Pence that appears to prove Trump knew full well that he wasn’t allowed to just block the election results, and was lying about it anyway

We’ve long known that Trump tried everything he could think of to get Pence to block the certification of Joe Biden’s win—including reportedly calling Pence a “pussy” and saying they wouldn’t be friends anymore if the then VP didn’t agree. But the indictment reveals further instances of Trump browbeating Pence in an attempt to get him to do his bidding—and, even more crucially, it appears to contain evidence that the then president was knowingly lying about the election to his supporters. As investigators note:

On December 25, when the Vice President called the Defendant to wish him a Merry Christmas, the Defendant quickly turned the conversation to January 6 and his request that the Vice President reject electoral votes that day. The Vice President pushed back, telling the Defendant, as the Vice President already had in previous conversations, “You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.”

On December 29, as reflected in the Vice President’s contemporaneous notes, the Defendant falsely told the Vice President that the “Justice Dept [was] finding major infractions.”

On January 1, the Defendant called the Vice President and berated him because he had learned that the Vice President had opposed a lawsuit seeking a judicial decision that, at the certification, the Vice President had the authority to reject or return votes to the states under the Constitution. The Vice President responded that he thought there was no constitutional basis for such authority and that it was improper. In response, the Defendant told the Vice President, “You’re too honest.” Within hours of the conversation, the Defendant reminded his supporters to meet in Washington before the certification proceeding, tweeting, “The BIG Protest Rally in Washington, D.C., will take place at 11.00 A.M. on January 6th. Locational details to follow. StopTheSteal!”

Emphasis ours.

The extremely long list of people who told Trump the election was not stolen and that his claims of fraud were false

Essential to Smith’s case is proving that Trump knew he was lying, and the indictment includes a comically long list of people who told Trump, in no uncertain terms, that Biden won fair and square. Those people include:

• The vice president
• Senior leaders at the Justice Department
• The director of national intelligence
• Officials at the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency
• Senior White House attorneys 
• Senior staffers on Trump’s reelection campaign 
• State legislators and officials 

That’s in addition to, as the indictment says, “[s]tate and federal courts—the neutral arbiters responsible for ensuring the fair and even-handed administration of election laws—reject[ing] every outcome-determinative post-election lawsuit filed by the Defendant, his co-conspirators, and allies, providing the Defendant real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”

The email in which a member of Trump’s own advisory team called the election-fraud claims by the president’s coup-plotting lawyers “conspiracy shit”