Trump has been summoned to appear at 4 p.m. Eastern time before Magistrate Judge Moxila A. Upadhyaya at the E. Barrett Prettyman U.S. Courthouse. He will enter a plea to four felony charges brought Tuesday following special counsel Jack Smith’s wide-ranging investigation that scrutinized Trump’s attempts to mislead the public with claims that the election had been stolen, despite his private acknowledgment that he had lost.
He is not expected to be fingerprinted, have a mugshot taken or be placed under arrest.
The area around the courthouse was quiet Thursday morning, with Metropolitan Police and Homeland Security officers outnumbering the dozens of reporters waiting to enter the building or setting up cameras along the sidewalk. Only a small number of protesters gathered outside. City dump trucks lined the street in front of the main entrance to the building, ready to block streets if needed.
Trump has attempted to cast the indictment and other legal challenges he faces as attempts to interfere with his 2024 presidential election campaign, complaining that he is being forced to spend time and money defending himself rather than campaigning.
“The Dems don’t want to run against me or they would not be doing this unprecedented weaponization of ‘Justice.’ BUT SOON, IN 2024, IT WILL BE OUR TURN. MAGA!” he posted on Truth Social on Thursday morning.
The indictment alleges that after Trump lost the 2020 election, he and his allies concocted a variety of schemes to try to keep him in office, including one to pressure officials in states that voted against him to overturn their results on the basis of false claims of fraud.
Trump is also accused in the indictment of using the power of the Justice Department in an attempt to overturn the election by pushing the agency to “conduct sham election crime investigations” and to wield its authority to “falsely” buttress the legitimacy of his schemes. The former president also solicited false slates of electoral votes from dozens of Trump-supporting electors in seven states, according to the indictment.
Trump is also alleged to have used false election fraud claims and the fake electoral slates to pressure then-Vice President Mike Pence to stop the Jan. 6, 2021, congressional certification of Joe Biden’s victory by either throwing out results for the Democrat in certain states or by delaying the official electoral vote count.
When Pence refused on the morning of Jan. 6 to comply, the indictment states, Trump took advantage of the violence at the Capitol “by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud and convince Members of Congress to further delay certification based on those claims.”
Additional charges could be possible as the case progresses. The indictment refers to six unnamed co-conspirators with enough detail, such as dates of conversations, to provide strong indications as to their identities.
Smith said Tuesday that his team’s “investigation of other individuals continues.”
The new charges against Trump are just the latest developments in the legal peril the former president faces as he campaigns for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
In March, he is scheduled to stand trial in New York on allegations that he paid an adult film star through an intermediary so she would not disclose news of an alleged affair shortly before the 2016 election, and that he covered up the payment while in office. In May, Trump is scheduled to face charges of willfully retaining classified government records after leaving office in 2020 and obstructing the investigation into the matter.
And more is expected. Fulton County, Ga., Dist. Atty. Fani Willis in Atlanta has said she will make a decision on an indictment by Sept. 1 following a lengthy investigation into Trump’s efforts to pressure state election officials to “find” the votes needed for him to reverse his loss in the key state in 2020.