The US Department of Justice has again accused the former president of trying to overturn his 2020 election loss
Former President Donald Trump has lashed out at the US administration and the Department of Justice over their latest attempt to prosecute him for alleged interference in the 2020 presidential election.
The Republican candidate in this year’s race for the White House has described the legal campaign targeting him as “a direct assault on democracy” and a case of actual election interference.
Trump’s statements follow a new indictment filed against him by Special Counsel Jack Smith, accusing the former head of state of illegally trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election results. The new document is a stripped-down version of last year’s criminal case against Trump, which alleged that he “spread lies” of “outcome-determinative fraud” in the election by insisting that he had won the race at the time instead of Joe Biden. Trump launched an appeal in that case, claiming immunity from prosecution as president, and the initial indictment was dismissed last month by the Supreme Court.
The revised document, which is shorter and lacking part of the original that had accused Trump of trying to force the Justice Department to overturn his election loss, still lays out the same four charges that prosecutors initially brought against the former president. Among them are conspiracy to defraud the US, conspiracy against the voting rights of citizens, and charges relating to the disruption of Congress’ certification of the electoral vote by a mob of Trump’s supporters on January 6, 2021.
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Trump, who has repeatedly denied wrongdoing and denounced the case as an attempt to prevent him from returning to power, slammed the new indictment in a slew of posts on his Truth Social platform on Tuesday, calling it a “resurrection of a dead witch hunt.”
Trump claimed that the Supreme Court’s immunity ruling should have seen the entire case being dismissed, and lambasted the “deranged” Jack Smith for bringing it up again “in an act of desperation, and in order to save face.”
“This is merely an attempt to interfere with the election, and distract the American people from the catastrophes [Vice President] Kamala Harris has inflicted on our nation,” Trump wrote. He also accused the Department of Justice of breaking its own 60-days policy, which prohibits it from taking any action that could influence the race in the two months preceding the presidential election.
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Trump’s attorneys have not yet responded to media requests for comment. The case is one of four criminal prosecutions currently faced by the former president.
