The attack on our nation's capital on January sixth, twenty twenty one, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. Is described in the indictment. It was fueled by lies, 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.
Donald Trump appears again today in federal court, this time in Washington, d C. Where he faces criminal conspiracy charges. It's the third criminal case against the former president and possibly not the last. I'm west Kosova today on the Big Tag Bloomberg. Sarah Forden and Zoe Tillman tell us what we can expect today and in the months ahead as Trump shuttles between campaign and courtroom. Sarah, this one
feels a little bit different. There's been a lot of conversation about how the New York case involving hush money is very specific, the Florida case against Trump involving his handling of classified documents very specific, and this case feels more sweeping and possibly more consequential. Why is this one different?
So this really feels like the big indictment because it's looking at all the efforts that Trump went through to try to stay in office after he lost the election. This is taking all the events leading up to the January sixth insurrection and unpacking how that came into play and how that unfolded. And as we know, I mean, the investigation has been going on for several years and now we're looking to see how Jack Smith, the Special Council, is going to tell this story of what happened.
And Zoe, let's talk about some of the specifics in the case, because there's a lot of details in here and they can be a little bit hard to sort out.
Yeah, you know, what's interesting is that they've charged this as a conspiracy case, but they've charged it as sort of a constellation of lots of little mini conspiracies making up this broad conspiracy to hold on to power as long as possible. And so it's not as if they've said, you know, trying to pressure the vice president, that's it, that's the offense. They're saying that, in totality, all of
these things made up the conspiracy. So they included immediately after the election trying to go into battleground states when it was clear that Biden had won to try and pressure state officials to change vote totals, to perhaps delay certifying what they were sending in, you know, to Congress to certify from the state results, and then you know, trying to certify slates of fake electors to sign those
certifications saying Trump won when he didn't. It was then you know, going to court and presenting election fraud claims to convince judges to step in, you know, and then back in Washington as it got closer to the date of certification, by Congress pressuring Vice President Mike Pence telling him, you know, you can step in here, and pen saying no, I can't. The indictment does not charge him, we should say, with inciting the riot at the Capitol. It does not
charge him with that. It blames him for it. Certainly.
Now it is up to Congress to confront this egregious assault on our democracy. And after this, we're going to walk down and I'll be there with you. We're going to walk down anyone you want, but I think right here we're going to walk down to the capital. You'll never take back our country with weakness. You have to show strength, and you have to.
And then it says even after that happened, that Trump exploited that event to try and call members of Congress afterwards to get them to at the last minute stop the certification, you know, and as we know, none of it worked. Congress certified the election president of.
The United States.
Are as follows.
Joseph ar Biden Junior of the state of Delaware has received three hundred and six votes Donald J. Trump of the state of Florida.
But what the Justice Department is alleging is that there were these, you know, an overarching conspiracy made up of all sorts of different efforts that have been reported by Trump and by his allies to ultimately stop this from happening.
And then also his efforts to get his own Justice Department to play a role in that's right. So that's a huge piece of it, you know, as we look at the separation of powers and the independence, you know, of law enforcement, that was a real effort to have his way.
The most serious charge against him, obstructing an official proceeding, carries up to twenty years in prison, but we would expect him to face nowhere near that if he's convicted. He's a first time offender, those maximums or can be
sort of misleading in how we think about consequences. But you know, it is certainly accurate to say that given the totality of what he's charged with the twenty years, the other offenses carry between five and ten year maximums, he would certainly be very likely to face months or years in prison if he's convicted.
Zoe, you mentioned that the Special Council Jack Smith, who's bringing this case, didn't charge Trump with inciting the mob that then went into the Capitol. There've been a whole lot of talk about whether Trump was responsible for that, Why didn't Smith make that part of a charge.
You know, there had been a lot of speculation ahead of this that trying to charge him with something like seditious conspiracy or insurrection or incitement would be, you know, even harder than the case that they're making, which is by no means a simple or easy case. Unprecedented, its novel,
it's extraordinary. But getting into sort of the political motivations is a different question from what he was trying to achieve, if that makes sense, you know, getting into what speech was protected under the First Amendment as just political speech versus what was seditious in what he was saying at the time, those are you know, far less tested theories that they would have to pursue in court, and you know, just more politically dicey, I think, and public perception wise,
a harder case potentially to make.
So, Sarah, it seems like Smith is focusing more on what Trump did, what actions he took, and not just on what he said.
As Zoh, he said, he's going to have to prove all of this in court, so he's going to have to lay out facts. Obviously. The more that he can queue to those facts and lay out that story based on actions, the stronger his case is going to be.
There's another big focus of the case, which seems to be that Smith is trying to prove that Trump knew that he had lost the election, and that the case really hinges on his ability to show that Trump was acting in bad faith when he was saying that he won.
I mean, this case is really trying to settle once and for all the whole question around whether or not Trump knew and accepted the fact that he had lost the election, which has persisted notwithstanding it being debunked and denied up and down the chain. And so that is going to be absolutely crucial for him to present this case.
You know, proving intent is always a very difficult task for prosecutors. You know, I think what's incredible here and that they're working with is a massive body of evidence of what Trump said, what other people said they told him, you know, from not just the criminal investigation, but also the Congressional committee that investigated this and air on national you know, primetime television, a lot of you know, key administration players and state officials who testified we told him
this was false. So the public has seen some of this evidence already that they've now put in the indictment.
But you know, the standard of proof in court is different than in the court of public opinion, and you know, the defense, we expect, will really dig into the difference between what people were telling Donald Trump versus what he truly believed at the time, because he certainly was being told by others around him that there was fraud, and there was support for that from you know, close advisors.
So you know, I think that's going to be likely, you know, a focus for the defense in trying to pick apart the government's case.
Sarah Zoe says that the public had heard some of this before, and a lot of that was from the Congressional January sixth hearings, and it seems like Jack Smith really relied a lot on the work that that committee had done.
Well.
There was certainly a lot of evidence that had been you know, kind of tied up with the bow for him, So that was a great starting point. And then of course, during the months of the of the grand jury sitting, he brought in, you know, dozens of witnesses to drill down on each of those threads.
And certainly a major piece of that is someone who did not testify before Congress was former Vice President Mike Pence, and someone who very much did testify before the Grand jury was former Vice President Mike Pence.
In fact, one of our recent pieces focuses specifically on Mike Pence and the details about him that come out in the indictment, and we saw, you know, the indictment actually prompted the strongest rebuke from Mike Pence that we have seen to date about those events and what Trump had asked him to do. Pence actually said, no, one who violates the Constitution should be president. I think it's going to be very interesting to see what role Pence plays going forward.
In this proceeding Zoe. Another interesting facet of the case is that there are several unindicted co conspirators. Can you tell us just first, what is an unindicted co conspirator, because it keeps coming up.
So an unindicted co conspirator, just at a practical level, is someone that you know, we get a clue prosecutors are interested in that they are potentially building cases against. To charge a conspiracy, you have to have conspirators in the case, but you don't have to charge them, but you have to allege this conspiracy existed. Someone had to be in the indictment besides Trump to raise these charges. You know, it could mean that these are people who
will ultimately be charged. It could mean these are people that prosecutors are hoping to cut a deal with, and you know, it puts them on notice. And you know, in conversations with the lawyers for some of the people who are you quite obviously referenced in the indictment as these unindicted co conspirators. For instance, Conservative attorney John Eastman, his attorneys said to me, you know, so it's obvious that's who they're referring to, even though they don't name him.
But this lawyer told me they didn't get notice from the Justice Department that they were going to refer to John Eastman. And this lawyer said that they have not gotten a target letter saying he should expect charges. So, you know, it's not really clear what's going to happen to these people, but it does confirm what Jack Smith said in announcing the indictment, which is that their investigation continues.
Zoey remind us of John Eastman's role in what happened after the election.
John Eastman is a very prominent conservative legal thinker, and he was a close advisor to Donald Trump during this period. But you know, I think what the indictment focuses on especially is the role that he played in drafting what was considered sort of a plan for how to either
stop or delay Congress from certifying the vote. Constitutional scholars widely panned the legal underpinnings of these memos that John Eastman wrote, but you know, he was considered at the time the architect of that plan.
And as you say, there's enough information in the indictment to figure out who some of the other unindicted co conspirators are and who are they that's right.
The most prominent unindicted alleged co conspirator is co conspirator one, which we've matched to Rudy Giuliani, the former New York City mayor and US attorney who was really directing the Trump campaigns legal efforts in battleground states to try and stop the states from certifying that President Joe Biden won. Rudy Giuliani really played such a prominent role publicly in so many battleground states that it makes sense that he would feature prominently in the indictment given the breadth of
the conspiracy that's alleged. The other individuals that we've identified include Sidney Powell, another prominent conservative attorney who was also involved in a lot of the legal efforts and brought unsuccessful court challenges. There's also Jeffrey Clark, who was a senior Justice Department official at the time and an ally of Donald Trump, even as almost everyone else in the Justice Department was trying to stop what the president was trying to do at the time, at one point, Trump
considered installing Jeffrey Clark as the acting Attorney General. There was also Kenneth Cheesebro, another attorney involved in sort of the state operations, and we always want to be careful in naming someone who has not been charged. And so what we did is the indictment features for the five individuals that we've confirmed, you know, quotes and other information that squarely matches what's already publicly known about what they
did in the post election period. And we've also independently confirmed those names as being who those write ups in the indictment are meant to refer to. There's a sixth person who's mentioned that we have not confirmed yet.
And what do the people we've been talking about say about all this?
They say that this is, you know, a political witch hunt. They say that this is illegitimate. We've had, you know, a statement from Rudy Giuliani's spokesperson saying this is the Biden regime going after his enemies and protected speech. John Eastman, we know his lawyers have been drafting a memo to send to the Special Counsel's office arguing why he was just being a lawyer and that's not a crime. As of now, no one has indicated that they are turning
on Donald Trump. Of the group that we've identified.
Sarah and Donald Trump, of course, has been very vocal on social media. What is he saying about all this?
Yes, so Donald Trump is continuing to denounce these actions as a witch hunt, you know, the corrupt Biden administration. He even managed to jump out ahead of the Special Council and announced once again that he was going to be indicted, you know, any day now. So he is using it to date very effectively to stoke his fundraising. Even before the indictment came, he was sending out ads flagging the indictment. He is, you know, using it as part of his political campaign speech.
And you know, we should note that he's been sued civilly in connection with January sixth, and across all of those cases has denied wrongdoing, denied liability, and we fully expect him to plead not guilty and fight these charges as well.
After the break, how Trump will defend himself against these charges from the Special Cantle Zoey, we talked about Jack Smith's case against Trump. What is the defense that Trump is expected to mount.
A Few things that we can glean from what he said publicly and also you know, conversations with sources, the main one being that how do they prove that he knew that these were lies and what his intent was into taking all of the actions that he did. So we've seen him repeatedly say what I was doing was political activity. First Amendment protected speech. As both president and as a US citizen, he certainly has a sweeping right to speak and to say that he thinks something is
fraudulent or not. So, you know, we expect defenses framed around you know, what he really believed at the time and when he was saying to someone, please do X because there has been fraud. Was that fraudulent in and of itself, or was that just him exercising his opinion and trying to encourage someone to take action based on that. It is wrapped up in the politics of what happened, which is going to be both complicated to prove and defend against. We might see some re litigation over how
they gathered evidence in the case. Trump's lawyers had fought putting people like Mike Pence before the grand jury on executive privilege ground. The case could be another vehicle for them to try and get at least some pieces of evidence or testimony tossed out, so can they chip away at the indictment first before it goes to trial, they could argue that there is no way to get a fair trial in Washington, which is a heavily democratic city
that overwhelmingly voted against him. That's a really hard argument to make and win, but they can try it. So you know, there are a couple ways for them to make early attacks on the indictment, and then we've started to see them lay the foundation for how they might try to attack it in a trial.
The questions around the fraud claims are going to be very interesting, and it may be even that Jack Smith is trying to push them into attempting that kind of a defense, which could be good for the prosecutor because in all the sixty plus cases that they filed claiming that there was election fraud, they were all thrown out. There was no evidence that was actually ever stood up, and so they don't really have a basis for that kind of a defense.
Trump once again is expected to appear in court today. What's going to happen there? What will we see?
So we are expecting him to present himself. He will not be arrested, but he will be booked. He will have to give his personal information, He will be fingerprinted digitally, we are expecting that he will enter a plea, although that has not yet been confirmed. We are fully expecting yet another media circus around a Donald Trump or hearing.
And then Zoe, what actually happens next when it comes to the calendar, how does this case proceed normally?
And this is not normal? Normally, we would expect things to move fairly quickly. There would be a schedule set for the government to turn over all of their evidence to the lawyers, usually within a period of a couple weeks or a couple months. The judge would set a schedule for them. The defense then to file on emotions. If they want to contest the indictment or the evidence, they could do that. They would argue over that, and then we would have a trial date on the calendar,
and things would move at a fairly steady clip. The complication here, of course, is that this is now the third criminal indictment against Donald Trump. They're already extensive schedules set in the first two cases, the first in New York in the hush money payment's case and the second
in South Florida in the classified documents case. Even with just one trial on the calendar in New York, the judge in Florida had to mediate a fight between the government and Trump's lawyers over how far out to set a schedule. Trumps lawyers it argued for no schedule at all until after the twenty twenty four election next November, and we now have dates in both March and May
for trials. It's very likely that they would argue that nothing can happen in Washington until after those trials take place. So you know, we're certainly anticipating another schedule fight. But judges will have to be mindful of his rights as a defendant, and that is a priority now for judges at this stage. He is innocent until proven guilty. He has a right to prepare his defense to be present. They cannot try him in his absence. He needs to be there unless he doesn't want to be, but that
would be extraordinary. And then he's running for president and there are commitments to that that they're going to argue are important and that he needs to be there for. So you know, who knows what kind of date we're looking at and what kind of time frame for this third.
Case, And Sir, to complicate things even further, there's the possibility even the likelihood of a fourth indictment in Georgia. Can you catch us up on that case?
Absolutely? All eyes are now going to turn to Atlanta, where the Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has already signaled that she is preparing to move on bringing charges in the first three weeks of August. She is also investigating efforts to overturn the election. So very similar fact patterns to what Jack Smith is alleging. We are racing for the possibility that she could charge under the Reicho,
the Racketeering Act. So those could actually be very serious charges as well coming in Georgia.
So Zoe, how do they actually schedule these different cases? If Donald Trump has the right to be there for his trials as a practical matter, how can he be in so many different places at once.
They may not know coordinate in a direct sense, but we already saw an example of this in Florida, where as the judge with hearing arguments on the trial schedule, she asked the lawyers, you know, I tell me the date in New York and they said, the trial is set for I think it's March twenty fourth or something around.
Then she said, how firm is that, you know, so you can already see the wheels turning in her head that if it's a you know, March twenty fourth date, she asked how much time is expected for that, If they're expecting eight weeks or six weeks, She's then building that out. A judge is not going to set a schedule in their court room that's going to interfere with
another judges operation. So they might not be picking up the phone to call that other judge, but they're going to ask the lawyers to lay out all the dates when they need to be in court somewhere else, and they will then have to have their clerk look at their calendar and set dates that are somehow different, Zoe.
Another thing that it appears at least that Jack Smith may have in his favor is the judge in.
This case, the judge that it's been randomly assigned to, is Judge Tanya Chutkin. She has been on the bench for a number of years now. She was confirmed under former President Barack Obama. You know, it's important to say at the outset that judges receive lifetime appointments. They're not politically bound or required to be loyal to the president
or the party that put them on the bench. I think what Donald Trump is really up against is that Judge Chutkin, along with most of the judges in Washington, have been hearing January sixth rioter cases for two years now, extremely familiar with the events of the day and what happened.
And you know, Judge Chutkin is among those who have talked about the seriousness of what happened that day in presiding over these other cases, you know, and she does not have a reputation as someone who has questioned the government's narrative of what happened on January sixth. Only a handful of judges have really pushed back on how the government has prosecuted these cases so far, and she is not one of them.
When we come back, can Trump delay his trials until after the election? Sarah? Of course, all of this is happening as the twenty twenty four presidential campaign is heating up and Donald Trump is surprisingly I suppose, use these indictments to his benefit.
I mean, he has been very successful so far in using them to raise money, and his followers have been digging into their pockets and donating. We are watching to see if that trend continues, there is some indication that maybe the shiny indictment motivator is wearing off a little bit as the indictments pile up. So that is something that we're going to be reporting into in the next couple of days.
Even and we know that one of the ways he's operated in the past is to try to delay trials as long as he can Zoe, as you mentioned, he has a big incentive to try to push these until after the election. Do you think that we're actually going to see trials occur during the presidential campaign?
As of now, it certainly looks very likely. The trial in New York in the state hush money case is set for March, and there's been no indication that the judge is open to reconsidering that timeline. In the Florida classified documents case, the judge set her schedule after hearing arguments and considering, you know, objections from both sides, so this was not a temporary placeholder calendar that she set.
I think one open question there is whether the expanded superseding indictment that we've now gotten in Florida, whether that will prompt the defense to ask for another delay of that May twentieth. Trial judges don't like being told what to do. They like to have a reputation for running their courtrooms with a firm hand and not being seen as easily swayed or you know, influenced by the attorneys. So you know, you tend to see judges say, once I've said my piece, that's the end of this.
The Florida judge was very interesting and when she was getting all the back and forth about the campaign and the elections and they wanted to push it off and jax With wanted in December, and she said, let's just focus on the documents and the time that we're going to need to get all these documents entered into the record and you know, laid out in the proper way. So she was very careful to steer clear of the politics and the demands from both sides.
That's right.
She even told Trump's lawyers to basically move on from that, that that was not going to be a part of her decision in setting a schedule. So I would you know, we would expect in DC now a similar approach where the judge was going to ask for the you know, practical logistics of how long do you need how much evidence is there, but a sweeping argument that this should be indefinitely postponed after the election because of politics. It's going to be a very hard sell.
And just to go back to the Florida schedule for a moment. If that may date is confirmed, conceivably we could see a resolution before the election.
And of course that's an important point because if Trump is able to delay things, or if just these complicated trials take a long time to reach their conclusions and Trump is re elected president, it's been allowed to talk about how he might choose to either direct his Justice Department to drop the cases or to pardon himself.
That's right. It's an open question whether he can pardon himself on federal charges. It is a closed question when it comes to state charges. So it's important to say that if he's convicted in New York, or if there's an indictment in Georgia and he's convicted there, as president, he does not have the power to tell anyone what to do, and he can't pardon himself on federal charges. You know, in theory, it's possible that he could pardon himself.
The president has pretty much unfettered power to pardon anyone, but you know, it would certainly be extraordinary and legal scholars would have a lot to say about it. If if these cases are pending and he tried to direct the Justice Department to stop them, it would trigger all sorts of legal and political mayhem. So there are a lot of different uncertainties and possibilities of what happens if he wins.
It just shows how how much we really are in uncharted territory with these cases and with this scenario.
Absolutely, Zoe, Obviously, there's just so much to keep track of, even just trying to put it all down on a calendar. As you continue to report on this what are the things you're most watching.
For right now? It is It is the schedule. It is literally plotting dates on a calendar, or my case, on a very intense color coded spreadsheet, you know, knowing when different filings are due in court. You know, we want to make sure that we're covering in the totality what both sides are arguing in court, and then how that matches with what Donald Trump is saying publicly and
on the campaign trail. It's you know, being in the courtroom, a downside of federal court proceedings is there are no cameras in the courtroom, and so making sure that we have eyes on not just what the lawyers are doing, but how the judges are handling these cases. So, you know, from the perspective of allegal reporter, really is just making sure we're reading everything, watching everything, just managing those logistics.
On our end.
It is.
I mean, you know, once it's indicted, it's all on the public record. Now the question now is, you know, how do they prove it, and how do they defend it? And what does a judge and a jury do with all of it?
Zoe Sarah, thanks so much for speaking with me, Thanks.
For having us, Thanks for having.
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