Up right now.
Let's let's listen in
and we'll get analysis
as soon as he done.
As soon as he's done.
Here he is, the special counsel,
Jack Smith.
Good evening.
Today, an indictment was unsealed
charging Donald J.
Trump with conspiring
to defraud the United States,
conspiring to disenfranchize voters
and conspiring
and attempting
to obstruct an official proceeding
The indictment was issued by a grand
jury of citizens here
in the District of Columbia,
and it sets forth
the crimes charged in detail.
I encourage everyone to read it in full
The attack on our nation's
capitol on January 6th 2021
was an unprecedented assault
on the seat of American democracy.
As described in the indictment.
It was fueled by lies
lies by the defendant
targeted at obstructing
a bedrock function of the U.S.
government.
The nation's
process of collecting,
counting and certifying the results
of the presidential election.
The men and women of law enforcement
who defended the U.S.
Capitol on January 6th are heroes.
They are patriots.
And they are the very best of us.
They did not just defend a building
or the people sheltering in it.
They put their lives on the line
to defend who we are as a country
and as a people.
They defended the very institutions
and principles
that define the United States
Since the attack on our capital,
the Department of Justice
has remained committed
to ensuring accountability
for those criminally responsible
for what happened that day.
This case is brought consistent
with that commitment,
and our investigation
of other individuals continues.
In this case,
My office will seek a speedy trial
so that our evidence
can be tested in court and judged
by a jury of citizens.
In the meantime, I
must emphasize
that the indictment is only an allegation
and that the defendant
must be presumed innocent
until proven guilty
beyond a reasonable doubt
in a court of law.
I would like to thank the members
of the Federal Bureau of Investigation
who are working on this investigation
with my office,
as well as the many career prosecutors
and law enforcement agents
from around the country
who have worked on
previous January six investigations.
These women and men are public servants
of the very highest order,
and it is a privilege
to work alongside them.
Thank you.
Why didn't you charge me
the other coconspirator Bishop.
A very powerful statement
from the special counsel, Jack Smith.
Evan Perez,
you've been covering this story
from the very, very beginning.
Let me get your analysis of what we
just heard.
Well, Wolf,
you know, we
expected that the special counsel
was going to be a man of very few words.
And that's, of course,
that's what you saw, what you heard there
One of the things that he did there
is he connected
what the former president was doing,
what he perpetrated
by spreading lies about alleged fraud
when he knew, according to prosecutors,
when he knew that there were
there was no fraud,
there was no evidence
to support his claims of fraud.
What he has done in this indictment
is tied
the violence that we saw
on on January six.
Of course,
the very vivid pictures
that we've seen of police officers
defending the Capitol,
defending the lives
of members of Congress
as they were trying to fulfill
their ceremonial function
of certifying the vote, tying
all of those acts there on January six
with the former president's
overall scheme to try to remain in power.
They describe
in this indictment,
Wolf, that
during the time of the violence,
the former president
was still trying to press members
of Congress
to essentially
try to somehow put off the vote,
trying to make sure
that even
if Vice President Pence
was not agreeing to his scheme,
that members of Congress
perhaps could find a way
to buy him more time and again,
find a way for him to remain in power.
And so that's what you see in this
45 page document.
And you heard there
from the special counsel
trying to trying to make sure
people understood
that this was not just about politics.
It's not about.
They acknowledged
that the former president
had the right to challenge the vote.
He has a right to lie about fraud
and everything.
What they
what he does not have a right to do,
according to prosecutors, is to do
is to carry out these three conspiracies
as a way to try to remain in power.
That's what they say.
Those are the crimes
that the former president committed
here, Wolf.
Yes, very specific crimes
and very detailed information.
We heard Jack Smith
Sheehan will say
this was an unprecedented assault
on the U.S. Capitol on January 6th.
It was fueled by lies, including lies
by the defendant
referring to the former president
of the United States.
I think it's so critical
if you want to look at only one paragraph
in this indictment, it's the first one.
It says Donald
Trump was the 45th president,
nine states and a candidate
for reelection in 2020.
The defendant
lost the 20, 20 presidential election.
Heart of the indictment
heart of the issue to the American people
makes no bones about it. He lost.
And these are
the things he tried to do
to cheat after losing.
And that's really
the heart of the whole issue here.
And Smith
obviously not
seeing a whole lot of details
but the indictment speaks for itself.
It's a very sweeping indictment
in terms of how it marshals
all the facts As Norm was referencing,
the earlier prosecution model
has been followed to a tee
that memorandum.
It takes care of the Justice
Department efforts
trying to corrupt the Justice Department,
how Trump tried to influence
the state elections,
and also how he tried to capitalize
on the violence
at the Capitol
and including the threats against Pence.
Notably,
it doesn't really make a lot of hay
with his actual remarks at the Capitol,
avoiding the sort of issue
on First Amendment
speech of March on the Capitol.
It avoids that.
It really
centers, as Evan was pointing out,
on his attempts
to illegally overturn
the legal results of the election.
And it does tell the story, you know, is
is as Norm was saying,
in sort of very simple ways,
because he tried
everything, tried
to get his Justice Department,
you know, to change its mind
and tried to get
someone else installed
to run the Justice Department as a
as a result of that.
And then there's a paragraph here
which says that then the plan
capitalized on ideas
presented in a memoranda
which evolved over time
from a legal strategy
to preserve the defendant's rights
to a corrupt plan.
To subvert
the federal government function
by stopping Biden's
electors votes from being counted.
So it started out as one kind of plan
where he's making phone calls.
He's calling Brad Raffensperger.
He's saying,
you know, you've got those votes
hidden somewhere. You got to do this.
And then when that failed the last ditch
attempt, as he points out
here, was to create, you know, this fake
elector theory, which,
of course, was fake.
And goes through it
and goes through the desperation,
I think, of
what was what was going on in his mind.
And Jack Smith basically said
that the defendant, Trump,
was criminally responsible
for what happened on January six.
Very strong words indeed.
You want to react?
Well, I just want to say,
I don't think we should ignore
when when the indictment came down.
The first text
I got from a justice source was
the investigation is not over.
The special counsel made that very clear.
Again, the level of detail in this
when when you go to page seven,
where it outlines
all of the people who told Trump
that he had lost the election, it's
not one person. It's not two.
There are eight listed here
from the vice president
to the attorney general
to the director of national intelligence,
the Department of Homeland Security.
It just speaks to exactly
what we were really told
about this indictment was
it was going to underscore over and over.
Finally, there's one thing here
I think
may be new toward the end on page 33,
it it mentions here, it's talking about
Mike Pence
and it says former
vice president on December 29th
as reflected in the vice president's
contemporaneous notes.
The defendant Donald Trump told
the vice president
that the Justice Department
was finding major infractions.
So the details of that are interesting
but all of a sudden
I don't think we've known before
that Pence had contemporaneous notes.
So what else we knew that Pence was upset
that the president had lied
about what he had said. We knew that.
But the notes I agree with you,
the fact that he had taken notes
or dictated notes
is something I'm
sure that Jack Smith found very useful.