On Tuesday, special counsel Jack Smith filed a revised indictment against Donald Trump relating to his attempts to illegally overturn the outcome of the 2020 election. The new, narrower indictment is intended to take into account the Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision in July that invented a previously nonexistent concept of immunity for U.S. presidents.
The biggest change to the indictment: All charges related to Trump’s attempts to intimidate Justice Department officials to support his lie that the 2020 election was stolen were dropped.
However, the bulk of the original charges remain. Trump still faces charges for other actions he took to undermine the election, including conspiring to aid fraudulent electors who were willing to lie about the election results in several swing states. He also faces charges related to attempts to pressure former Vice President Mike Pence to unconstitutionally refuse to certify the election results.
In Trump v. United States, Trump’s legal team attempted to dismiss his election interference lawsuit with the shocking argument that American presidents are completely immune from prosecution for crimes committed while in office. In fact, they argued, word for word, that this applies even when a president orders the assassination of his political opponents.
On July 1, the Supreme Court’s right-wing majority largely agreed with that reasoning, declaring in a 6-3 ruling that such immunity exists as long as the criminal acts in question are somehow part of “official” conduct. The Supreme Court did not, however, bother to define what counts as “official.” The case was instead remanded to the lower courts to determine what counts as “official.”
Justice Sonya Sotomayor warned in a vehement dissent that the decision “makes a mockery of the fundamental principle of our Constitution and our system of government that no one is above the law.”
The federal indictment against Trump alleges that he masterminded a conspiracy to overturn the 2020 election, culminating in the deadly attack on January 6, 2021.
