WASHINGTON — The federal indictment accusing Donald Trump of trying to stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election includes detailed accusations of Trump and his alleged co-conspirators’ pressure on individual state officials.
The central plot to overturn the election, as described in the indictment a federal grand jury in Washington, D.C., handed up Tuesday, involved switching out legitimate slates of electors in multiple states Joe Biden had won with false electors recruited by Trump and his advisers.
The sweeping indictment also accuses Trump and six co-conspirators of using the U.S. Justice Department to falsely insinuate that there were legitimate concerns with the elections in each state and presenting dueling slates of electors to Vice President Mike Pence to create a false controversy about which electors to count.
But those parts of the scheme depended on first creating the slates of fake electors and having state officials grant them legitimacy, according to the indictment.
To gather those fraudulent electors, Trump and his close allies pressured, threatened and lied to state lawmakers and elections officials in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, according to the indictment.
Trump “and his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use knowing deceit in the targeted states to impair, obstruct, and defeat the federal government function,” the indictment reads.
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