Trump indictment: Charges feature former president’s effort to subvert Pennsylvania election results

A federal grand jury in Washington charged former President Donald Trump with conspiracy to defraud the United States and other crimes Tuesday for his efforts to subvert the 2020 presidential election results in Pennsylvania and six other battleground states.

Here are some of the local highlights:

The four-count indictment unsealed Tuesday accused Trump and six uncharged, unnamed coconspirators of a broad conspiracy to falsely claim the election results in Pennsylvania were fraudulent and to persuade state legislators to overturn them.

» READ MORE: Read the indictment

Specific steps listed in the indictment include:

· A Nov. 11, 2020, tweet in which Trump publicly maligned then-Philadelphia City Commissioner Al Schmidt for saying on TV news that there was no evidence of widespread fraud in Philadelphia. Schmidt, who is now Pennsylvania’s secretary of state, testified before the congressional committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol that he and his family later received death threats.

· A Nov. 25, 2020, hearing that State Sen. Doug Mastriano and Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani convened in Gettysburg the day after certification of the state’s election results. At that hearing, Giuliani falsely claimed Pennsylvania had issued 1.8 million absentee ballots and received 2.5 million in return.

According to the indictment, a Trump campaign staffer later sent an internal message saying that Giuliani’s claims were “just wrong” and that “there’s no way to defend it.”

» READ MORE: ‘POTUS just called me’: Pa. GOP emails shed new light on 2020 election upheaval

Trump’s deputy campaign manager responded: “We have been saying this for a while. It’s very frustrating.”

» READ MORE: As it happened: Donald Trump indicted in efforts to overturn 2020 election; Pennsylvania allegedly played a key role

· On Dec. 4, 2020, after Republican leadership in the Pennsylvania legislature issued a statement that the General Assembly lacked authority to overturn the popular vote and appoint its own slate of electors, Trump retweeted a post labeling them cowards.

· Trump repeatedly raised allegations with Justice Department officials that there were 205,000 more votes than voters in Pennsylvania. Each time, they informed him that claim was false.

· On Jan. 6, as rioters stormed the Capitol building, Trump publicly repeated that false claim.

As part of the conspiracy, the indictment alleges Trump and his allies tried to persuade Republicans to send Congress slates of fraudulent electors to cast the electoral votes for the seven battleground states.

The indictment alleges that at Trump’s direction, fraudulent electors “convened sham proceedings” in seven targeted states, including Pennsylvania, to cast fraudulent ballots in his favor.

In Pennsylvania, 20 prominent Republicans from across the state signed on to the effort including former U.S. Rep. and gubernatorial candidate Lou Barletta; Allegheny County Council member Sam DeMarco; state GOP Vice Chair Bernadette Comfort; Bucks County GOP chair Pat Poprik; Republican national committee member Andy Reilly; Kevin Harley, a former spokesperson for Gov. Tom Corbett; and Ted Christian, a top Trump strategist in the state.

» READ MORE: Was Doug Mastriano Trump’s Pa. ‘point person’ in fake elector plot? Or barely involved? Campaign remains silent.

But the indictment describes skepticism of the fake electors plan even among their ranks.

During a Dec. 12 conference call organized by Trump’s campaign, Trump’s electors “expressed concern about signing certificates representing themselves as legitimate electors.”

A Trump ally “falsely assured them that their certificates would be used only if [Trump] succeeded in litigation” he was pursuing at the time challenging the state’s election results, the document says. And eventually language to that effect was added in the documents the Pennsylvania false electors sent to Congress.

Pennsylvania’s false electors were one of the only states to include such language — a precaution Gov. Josh Shapiro, when he was attorney general, cited as a factor that would make it difficult to prosecute them for forgery as the attorney general in Michigan has opted to do in that state.

According to the indictment, one Trump campaign official bristled at the language the Pennsylvania false electors added and cautioned not to let the electors in other states know.

“If it gets out we changed the language for PA, it could snowball,” the official wrote in a message quoted in the indictment.

Nevertheless, the indictment says, Trump used the Pennsylvania certificates “to deceitfully target the government function, and did so contrary to how fraudulent electors were told they would be used.”

The indictment does not name Trump’s alleged coconspirators, but one is identifiable as Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who grew up in Northeast Philadelphia and graduated from Father Judge High School in 1985.

The charging document describes him as a DOJ official who “worked on civil matters” and, along with Trump, “attempted to use the Justice Department to open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud.”

The Jan. 6 congressional committee previously documented Clark’s role in the fake elector scheme.

The indictment cites a draft letter Clark proposed sending to state officials in Georgia that said the legislature there should appoint pro-Trump electors. Clark also wanted to send similar letters to officials in other battleground states — a plan that would give Trump’s “lies the backing of the federal government,” the indictment says.

» READ MORE: Jeffrey Clark, the Philly native who Trump almost named AG

A White House lawyer told Clark on Jan. 3 that there had been no widespread fraud, and that if Trump remained in office nonetheless, there would be “riots in every major city in the United States.”

According to the indictment, Clark responded: ”Well ... that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act,” referring to a law that allows the president to deploy the military domestically.

Senior DOJ officials under Trump have testified to Congress that they threatened to resign amid Trump’s plan to appoint Clark acting attorney general, at which point the plan fizzled out.

Neither Clark nor any of Trump’s other alleged coconspirators have been officially accused of wrongdoing.

Clark left Philadelphia soon after high school and went on to receive advanced degrees from Harvard and Georgetown. He spent most of his career practicing environmental law in Washington. Only after the 2020 election did he become a key Trump ally.

Both Trump and Attorney General Merrick Garland were in Pennsylvania in the days surrounding the unsealing of the indictment against the former president.

Trump, speaking at a campaign rally in Erie on Saturday, told the crowd of more than 4,000 people that the latest criminal charges are a part of what he described as an ongoing “witch hunt” to block him from winning another election. He railed against elected Republicans who he said aren’t doing enough to defend him.

“They impeach me. They indict me. They rig our elections,” he said. “And the Republicans just don’t fight the way … they’re supposed to fight.”

Garland, meanwhile, participating in a previously scheduled community event Tuesday night to celebrate National Night Out in North Philadelphia, addressed reporters briefly. He did not comment on the contents of the indictment but praised special counsel Jack Smith and his team.

“Mr. Smith and his team are experienced, principled career agents and prosecutors [and] can follow the facts and the law wherever they lead,” he said. “Any questions about this matter will have to be answered by the filings made in court.”

Staff writer Gillian McGoldrick contributed to this article.

Read the indictment:

Correction: A previous version of this story incorrectly reported that the fake Trump electors in Pennsylvania were the only ones to include conditional language in their certificate that they were only putting themselves forward as legitimate electors if the courts sided with the former president’s election challenges. New Mexico’s Trump electors also included a similar caveat.