Criminal Case Against Trump Exposes Fragility of U.S. Democracy

DOJ's Jack Smith denounced the attack on the U.S. Capitol as “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy."

Trump Criminal Charges Expose Fragility of U.S. Democracy

DOJ alleges ex-president “spread lies” to “erode public faith” in the 2020 election.

Jack Smith, the U.S. Department of Justice special counsel, accused former president Donald J. Trump late Tuesday of “conspiring to defraud the United States, conspiring to disenfranchise voters, and conspiring and attempting to obstruct an official proceeding.”

Trump was indicted on four criminal counts in all, resulting from a federal investigation into his conduct surrounding America’s 2020 presidential election and the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. Among the charges Smith filed against him were conspiracy to defraud the country; conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding; conspiracy against rights; and the obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding.

In a press conference Tuesday evening, Smith denounced the attack on the U.S. Capitol as “an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” saying it was “fueled by lies” propagated by Trump who “targeted and obstructed a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

Smith encouraged Americans to read the full, 45-page indictment and praised members of law enforcement who defended the U.S. Capitol during the Jan. 6 insurrection, calling them “heroes,” “patriots,” and “the very best of us.” He added, “They put their lives on the line to defend who we are as a country and as a people; they defended the very institutions and principles that define the United States.”

The three criminal conspiracies outlined in the indictment included a conspiracy to defraud the U.S. by way of dishonesty and deceit to “impair, obstruct and defeat” the lawful government process of counting and certifying votes, a conspiracy to “corruptly obstruct and impede the proceedings on Jan. 6 to certify American votes, and a conspiracy against “the right to vote and to have one’s vote counted.”

The indictment unsealed against the Republican presidential frontrunner also accused him of working with six undisclosed “co-conspirators known and unknown to the grand jury” to criminally “overturn the legitimate results of the 2020 presidential election.” Early speculation in the press pointed to Rudolph Giuliani, former Mayor of New York and one of Trump’s personal lawyers, as a possible co-conspirator, among several others.

The majority of the co-conspirators were described in the indictment as lawyers, but one was characterized as a political consultant who helped devise a plan to submit “fraudulent slates of presidential electors” to obstruct the vote, and another who worked inside the Justice Department itself, using it to “open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

Trump immediately blasted the indictment. “Why did they wait two and a half years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024?” he said. The move by the DOJ, he said, amounted to “election interference.”

Trump is expected to make his first court appearance in connection with this latest round of indictments late Thursday afternoon.

The indictment illustrated in sweeping and extremely detailed terms the extent to which Trump and his co-conspirators allegedly attempted to reverse the results of the election, from asserting that non-citizens, non-residents and tens of thousands of dead people had fraudulently voted to stating that voting machines had compulsorily switched the votes from Trump to Biden.

“Despite having lost, the defendant [Trump] was determined to remain in power” and “spread lies that there had been outcome-determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “These claims were false and the defendant knew they were false.” Rather than accept defeat, they said, Trump promoted the falsehood that he’d won the election, creating “an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger and erode public faith in the administration of the election.”

Trump, of course, had the right to challenge the results of the election through lawful means, which he did, the indictment noted, but he was “uniformly unsuccessful.”

Other allegations included how Trump tried to press the DOJ to back claims of voting fraud, supported the scheme to appoint false electors and sought to pressure his vice president, Mike Pence into leveraging the false electors to undermine the vote on Jan. 6, contributing to the worst violence in the Capitol since the War of 1812.

Smith said the DOJ’s investigation into the events surrounding the 2020 election is far from over and the agency is committed to ensuring the accountability of those criminally responsible for what happened on Jan. 6, marking the first time a U.S. election was threatened in more than 130 years.

He also emphasized that the DOJ will seek to bring a “speedy trial” and that while Trump has been criminally charged, the evidence must be tested and the former president must be presumed innocent until proven guilty.

Smith was appointed by U.S. Attorney General Merrick Garland in November to investigate both Trump’s handling of classified documents, as well as his conduct after losing the 2020 presidential election and his behavior surrounding Jan. 6.

Smith has already indicted Trump on charges of illegally keeping classified documents and obstructing justice. But this next phase could open the door to a trove of previously undisclosed details from some of Trump’s closest White House associates and even his own attorneys – some of whom may be among the co-conspirators in the indictment unsealed Tuesday evening.

This past spring, a U.S. district judge granted Smith a “crime-fraud” exception that allowed the special counsel to pierce Trump’s attorney-client privilege after presenting enough evidence to establish Trump may have committed a crime through his attorneys. 

As a rule, the so-called “seal of secrecy” between a lawyer and client does not include communications potentially made for the purpose of getting advice for the commission of a crime or to facilitate fraudulent activity. As a result, prosecutors were able to circumnavigate protections afforded to Trump’s lawyers, such as Evan Corcoran, who was compelled to testify before a grand jury, in addition to Trump’s former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, who declined to speak to the Jan. 6 Committee. 

All of which means the latest grand jury revelations may provide additional insight into what happened in the run-up to Jan. 6. Just as with his first two rounds of indictments, Trump was offered a chance to speak with the grand jury meeting at the federal courthouse in Washington ahead of the latest criminal charges, but he declined.

Trump’s lawyers did meet with Smith late last week, however, with Trump calling it a “productive meeting” on his Truth Social platform and stating that his attorneys explained to Smith “that I did nothing wrong, was advised by many lawyers, and that an indictment of me would only further destroy our country.”

With a rising number of indictments to contend with going into election season, it looks like Trump may face at least three trials – one in New York in March over the Stormy Daniels hush money payments, one in Florida in May over his handling of classified documents, and this one in Washington over allegations he tried to overturn the U.S. election – while running for the presidency in 2024. 

U.S. Credit Rating Slammed with Historic Downgrade

Remember America’s debt-ceiling fight? That didn’t help.

With the news moving at breakneck speed, it might be hard to recall exactly when President Biden and Congressional leaders staged their epic standoff over America’s budget and the debt ceiling that almost sank the U.S. economy.

While the rout was settled by early June, stern warnings were sounded by the world’s top credit ratings agencies — as well as U.S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen — that the very public display of infighting could result in a credit downgrade for the nation. Well, that’s exactly what’s happened.

On Wednesday, Fitch Ratings cut the U.S. government’s credit rating in this report, stating that “the rating downgrade of the United States reflects the expected fiscal deterioration over the next three years, a high and growing general government debt burden, and the erosion of governance.”

Yeah, that’s not good — and stuff like this absolutely does threaten the market for America’s $25 trillion in Treasurys.

The nation’s credit rating was lowered to 'AA' from 'AAA,’ the first by a major ratings agency in more than a decade, telegraphing the strong message that the U.S. needs to get its act together and address its political dysfunction, because it is wreaking havoc on the nation’s finances and, importantly, its ability to finance itself in the future.

The downgrade is the second time the U.S. has been stripped of its triple-A credit rating due to political polarization — the credit ratings agency Standard & Poor’s cut the nation’s rating amid an earlier debt-ceiling battle in 2011.

Fitch predicts America’s deficit will grow relative to gross domestic product this year, compared with last year, resulting from “cyclically weaker federal revenues, new spending initiatives and a higher interest burden.” 

It also expects that deficit to widen into 2025, with larger deficits driven by weak 2024 GDP growth, a higher interest burden and wider state and local government deficits.

“In Fitch's view, there has been a steady deterioration in standards of governance over the last 20 years, including on fiscal and debt matters, notwithstanding the June bipartisan agreement to suspend the debt limit until January 2025,” the credit ratings agency wrote in its report, referring to the deal Biden made with House Republicans.

“The repeated debt-limit political standoffs and last-minute resolutions have eroded confidence in fiscal management,” Fitch wrote. “In addition, the government lacks a medium-term fiscal framework, unlike most peers, and has a complex budgeting process. These factors, along with several economic shocks as well as tax cuts and new spending initiatives, have contributed to successive debt increases over the last decade.”

Fitch also was not impressed with the nation’s cuts to non-defense discretionary spending this spring, noting it offered “only a modest improvement to the medium-term fiscal outlook, with cumulative savings of $1.5 trillion by 2033,” a statistic cited by the U.S. Congressional Budget Office.

With the U.S. taking only incremental steps to tackle medium-term challenges related to rising social security and Medicare costs due to an aging population, Fitch believes the trend toward a rising deficit as a proportion of GDP will only continue.

Learning the Dark Arts of the ‘Grey Zone’

Is the West getting played by the likes of Russia and China?

Russia began its military invasion of Ukraine on Feb. 24, 2022 but, with the war dragging on for a year and a half with no end in sight, some security experts are calling on the West to wise up.

“Desperate to prevail, Russia has dangled the threat of nuclear retaliation against any western-supported escalation,” writes Michael Miklaucic this week in the Financial Times. A senior fellow at the Institute for National Strategic Studies at National Defense University in Washington, he suggests the West should not be so easily duped. Rather, it urgently needs to brush up on its own “grey zone” techniques – otherwise known as the dark art of subversion. 

“In these circumstances, one might ask if the grey zone remains a valid concept?” Miklaucic notes. “Are cyber attacks, disinformation and influence campaigns still relevant? The answer is a resounding ‘Yes.’”

With Ukraine representing one of many battlegrounds in a wider struggle over the new world order, the West needs to get sorted on “what is and is not permissible in international relations,” he argues, because both military and non-military strategies will continue to be deployed by Russia, China and other nations to challenge the West. 

Among recent grey-zone assaults: Russia’s online interference with the 2016 U.S. presidential election; cyberattacks on Ukraine, as well as malware attacks globally by the Sandworm hacker group, run by Russia’s military intelligence service; and China’s use of technology, naval power and trade embargoes to strong-arm its opponents. 

In addition, Russian and Chinese disinformation campaigns have repeatedly blamed the war in Ukraine on the infringement of the West, which has not been persuasive among Ukraine’s allies, but has been successful elsewhere. (Fun fact: ‘misinformation’ is when facts are wrong, but ‘disinformation’ when they are knowingly or deliberately wrong.)

Russian President Vladimir Putin has been one of the chief progenitors of such purported disinformation by leading the West to believe he might just consider tapping his nuclear arsenal. While a fallacy, says geopolitical and information warfare analyst Irina Tsukerman, it is a useful one, as it has worked in his favor in holding infinite leverage over the West.

“Putin is not interested in nuclear war, not even close,” she tells Power Corridor. “He wants to stay in power, live long and stay healthy. This is someone who values life. Look at the extreme measures he went to to keep from getting Covid. He enjoys his life, has a great time, has many lovers and palaces and yachts and a fortune. He’s 70 years old and he’s got young children. This is a man who plans to live to a ripe old age. He’s not going to be dropping any nuclear weapons. The West has done a terrible job of reading Putin’s motives.”

With the West shying away from offering direct military intervention in Ukraine, sticking to training, weapons and intelligence, Ukraine may prevent a major Russian victory, Miklaucic says, but it likely will stay mired in a “frozen conflict with Russia in indefinite possession of over 15 percent of Ukrainian territory. That would amount to a victory for Russia.”  

If the West is to retain or regain its upper hand in the world order, it must foster its own grey-zone toolbox, grounded in what Miklaucic terms “the non-military elements of strategic power.” One example: The International Criminal Court’s arrest warrant branded Putin a war criminal, which not only left him publicly ostracized, but forced him to curtail recent travel plans and undermined his Russia-Africa summit. The West’s ability to further sideline Putin, he says, will reside with these grey-zone techniques.