Charges against Donald Trump to be read in shadow of Capitol

Mike Pence offered unyielding criticism on of his former boss for pressuring him to thwart the will of the voters.

Mike Pence and his wife Karen Pence recite the pledge of allegiance at the Clinton County GOP Hog Roast this week. Picture: AFP

Donald Trump is expected to ­appear in court on Friday AEST to answer charges of conspiring to overturn the 2020 election, a case that will cast a dark and volatile cloud over the 2024 White House race for which he remains the presumptive Republican nominee.

The arrest and arraignment of the former president will take place in a federal courthouse within sight of the US Capitol that was stormed by his supporters on January 6, 2021, in what prosecutors say was the culmination of the alleged plot.

The 77-year-old Mr Trump is expected to enter a plea of not guilty at a hearing set to begin at 4pm on Thursday (6am Friday AEST) before magistrate judge Moxila Upadhyaya.

Although Mr Trump’s ­arraignment will be before a magistrate judge, the actual case is to be heard by federal district court judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former Democratic Party president Barack Obama, who has handed down some of the stiffest sentences in cases involving Capitol riot participants. Judge Chutkan, 61, also has a legal history with Mr Trump – she ruled against him in a November 2021 case of executive privilege.

The accusations that Mr Trump and six co-conspirators plotted to upend the 2020 election is the former president’s third criminal indictment since March, and the most serious of the cases threatening to derail his 2024 White House bid.

Mr Trump is already scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May next year on charges that he took top secret government documents to his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida and refused to return them. The twice-impeached former president also faces criminal charges in New York for allegedly paying election-eve hush money to porn star Stormy Daniels.

Mr Trump, who spent Wednesday playing golf at his Bedminster, New Jersey, club, has pleaded not guilty in the documents and hush money cases and has accused prosecutors of seeking to thwart his presidential bid with so-called “fake” indictments.

“This unprecedented indictment of a former (highly successful!) president, & the leading candidate, by far, in both the ­Republican Party and the 2024 general election, has awoken the world to the corruption, scandal & failure that has taken place in the United States for the past three years,” he said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.

The new conspiracy charges raise the prospect of Mr Trump being further embroiled in legal proceedings at the height of what is expected to be a bitter presidential campaign next year.

The plot allegedly included ­attempts to pressure vice-president Mike Pence into throwing out Electoral College votes at the January 6 joint session of congress called to certify Joe Biden’s election win, which Mr Pence eventually refused to do.

The former vice-president, who is likely to be a star witness at the trial, offered unyielding criticism on Wednesday of Mr Trump for pressuring him to thwart the will of the voters by refusing to certify Mr Biden’s election victory at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021. Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol that day called for Mr Pence to be hanged over his refusal.

“Anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again,” Mr Pence, who is also running for the Republican nomination, told reporters.

“I had no right to overturn the election and … what the president maintained that day and frankly, has said over and over again over the past two and a half years, is completely false.

“ Sadly, the president was surrounded by a group of crackpot lawyers who kept telling him what his itching ears wanted to hear.”

Mr Pence’s refusal to do as Mr Trump asked on January 6 forms a key part of the indictment.

Special counsel Jack Smith unveiled a 45-page indictment of Mr Trump on Tuesday, charging him with conspiracy to defraud the US and attempting to disenfranchise American voters with his false claims that he won the November 2020 election.

“The purpose of the con­spiracy was to overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election by using knowingly false claims of election fraud,” the indictment reads.

Mr Smith, a former war crimes prosecutor at the Hague, linked Mr Trump’s actions following his loss to Mr Biden directly to the ­attack on the Capitol, which he called an “unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy”. “It was fuelled by lies,” Mr Smith said. “Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government – the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

As president, Mr Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for seeking political dirt on Mr Biden from Ukraine and over the events of January 6 but was acquitted by the Republican-controlled Senate.

AFP