A federal grand jury on Tuesday re-indicted former President Donald Trump on four felony charges in the 2020 election subversion case.
Special counsel Jack Smith’s team secured the new indictment from a grand jury that did not previously hear evidence in the case after the Supreme Court ruled that presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for “official acts,” and signals the Justice Department’s intention to continue with the prosecution despite the ruling.
Smith’s original indictment was filed last August and accused Trump of attempting to use the Department of Justice in an “unlawful” attempt to overturn President Joe Biden’s victory. The superseding indictment has dropped some allegations against Trump, but maintains the same four charges that accuse him of conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
In light of the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling, the 36-page document references how Trump mixed political and personal duties in his actions post-election and during the Jan. 6 attack on the capitol.
“Throughout the conspiracies, although the Defendant sometimes used his Twitter account to communicate with the public, as President, about official actions and policies, he also regularly used it for personal reasons- including to spread knowingly false claims of election fraud…” the filing reads.
Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted on X, formerly Twitter, that the biggest change in the indictment appears to be the removal of former DOJ official Jeff Clark and details about Trump’s alleged efforts to place him in control of the department to pursue his election fraud claims.
Smith “streamlined the case and avoided immunity battles by removing Jeff Clark as an unindicted co-conspirator and cutting allegations about Trump’s interactions with his own WH officials,” wrote Randall Eliason, a law professor at George Washington University.
Anthony Michael Kreis, a law expert and political scientist at Georgia State University, wrote that the new indictment as an indication of Smith’s work to “preserve his case” amidst the Supreme Court ruling.
“The superseding indictment is the Special Counsel’s attempt to adhere to the Supreme Court’s presidential immunity decision without showing the prosecution’s cards in an evidentiary hearing,” he wrote on X.
National security attorney Bradley P. Moss called the changes to the indictment “smart.”
“All of this would arguably be inadmissible now under the SCOTUS ruling. No reason to bother keeping it in,” he wrote on X.
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