Trump is already scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May of next year on charges that he took top secret government documents to his Mar-A-Lago estate in Florida and refused to return them.
The twice-impeached former president also faces criminal charges in New York for allegedly paying election-eve hush money to a porn star.
Trump, who spent Wednesday playing golf at his Bedminster, New Jersey club, has pleaded not guilty in the documents and hush money cases and accused prosecutors of seeking to thwart his presidential bid with “fake” indictments.
“This unprecedented indictment of a former (highly successful!) president, & the leading candidate, by far, in both the Republican Party and the 2024 general election, has awoken the world to the corruption, scandal & failure that has taken place in the United States for the past three years,” he said in a post on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
“SHOULD NEVER BE PRESIDENT”
The new conspiracy charges raise the prospect of Trump being further embroiled in legal proceedings at the height of what is expected to be a bitter presidential campaign.
The plot allegedly included attempts to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out Electoral College votes at the Jan 6 joint session of Congress called to certify Biden’s win, which the vice president eventually refused to do.
“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence, who is also seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said Wednesday.
“Anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again,” he told reporters in Indianapolis.
Although Trump’s arraignment will be before a magistrate judge, the actual case is to be heard by US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former Democratic president Barack Obama, who has handed down some of the stiffest sentences in cases involving Capitol riot participants.
Chutkan, 61, also has a legal history with Trump – she ruled against him in a November 2021 case.
Trump had filed a lawsuit asserting executive privilege to block documents from being handed over to a congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.
He was no longer in the White House at the time, and Chutkan dismissed the suit, saying the former president’s argument “appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity.'”
“But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote.
As president, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for seeking political dirt on Biden from Ukraine and over the events of Jan 6 – but he was acquitted by the Senate both times.
Source: CNA
