The first one is Conspiracy To Defraud the United States. Second is the conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. And then the conspiracy against rights. Thats, of course, the Voting Rights of u. S. Citizens around the country. Now, ill read you just a part where the Special Counsel describes what theormer president is accused of dog here. It says that the defendant spread lies, that there had been outcome determinative fraud in the election and that he had actually won. These claims were false. And the defendant knew that they were false. But the defendant repeated and widely disseminated them anyway to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate. According to the prosecutors, wolf, the former president disregarded the advice of all of his appointed officials, people inside his own government, his experts, people from the Justice Department, people from the intelligence community, people from the Homeland Security department, all of whom were telling him that there was no s
Now in a usual case, an indictment would be returned to a Magistrate Judge in a sealed hearing. It would remain under seal until arrest. But jake, again, we dont know if there is an indictment here. But if there is, its unclear if theyre going to follow the usual script, because this case is of course completely unprecedented. We got a little preview, though, in the maralago indictment. What happened there is the former president , youll probably remember, he broke the news On Truth Social, and then there was several days before we got the details of the case. The Special Counsel got a lot of feedback on handling it that way, allowing the former president to fill the void, not giving people information and the facts in an indictment, particularly in a case of this kind of historic significance. So it will be interesting to see today if, if there is an indictment, how they handle it. If it will be unsealed immediately when the former president will be notified. As you noted, it appears
Office. What any of that portends is anyones guess at this hour. We have eyes on entrances and exits of that courthouse. Journalists there standing by and a few trained ears to the ground. As soon as we know something, anything at all, we will let you know. We should know today marks two weeks since donald trump announced that he had received a Target Letter in this case. It suggests he could be charged with Conspiracy To Defraud the United States, conspiracy to obstruct the january 6th session of congress, and depriving voters of their rights. Here with me are my guests. First, lets bring in justice and intelligence correspondent ken dilanian, who has been following all this for us today. Ken, bring us up to speed for what we do know at this hour. Reporter greetings from the department of justice, where we are not so patiently waiting for news that explains the developments you just laid out. There are a lot of uncertainties around this process, because this is two weeks to the day si
former president has been indicted in the special counsel s investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election. this was very much expected. he received a target letter in recent weeks informing thame he could very likely be charged in this investigation. he declined to appear before the grand jury. and his lawyers met with jack smith and his team late last week. while they did not expect they could stop an indictment, they hoped to delay it. it appears they were unsuccessful. jake? so we have the indictment here. there are four counts. count one, conspiracy to defraud the united states. count two, conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding. count three, obstruction of and attempt to obstruct an official proceeding. and count four, conspiracy against rights. evan perez perez tell us about this indictment of the former president of the united states donald j. trump. these match up with the ones
perez. evan, what more are we learning right now about this indictment of former president trump. wolf, one of the key things that the special counsel gets into in this 45-page document here, this indictment, is describing the former president and his state of mind, that he knew he had lost the election and still continued to peddle these lies and then entered into a number of conspiracies to defraud the united states, to obstruct and impede the january 6th congressional proceeding, which, of course, is the ceremonial proceeding, by which the official votes are counted in this country. and then a conspiracy against the right to vote and have one s vote counted. those are the three conspiracies that the special counsel is alleging the former president led, along with some co-conspirators. as you pointed out, we have four counts that are listed here in this indictment.