What’s the conspiracy against rights?

Trump is accused of using “dishonesty,fraud and deceit to impair,obstruct and defeat” the counting and certifying of the election results.

Trump is also accused of violating a post-Civil War Reconstruction Era civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to interfere with rights that are guaranteed by the constitution,in this case:the right to vote and have one’s vote counted. It’s punishable by up to 10 years in prison.

The provision was originally part of a set of laws passed in 1870 in response to violence and intimidation by members of the Ku Klux Klan aimed at keeping black people from the polls.

But it has been used over the years in a wide-range of election fraud cases,including to prosecute conspiracies to stuff ballot boxes or not count certain votes. The conspiracy doesn’t have to be successful,meaning the fraud doesn’t have to actually affect the election.

The Justice Department won a conviction on the charge earlier this year in the case ofDouglass Mackey,a far-right propagandist (known by his Twitter handle ‘Ricky Vaughn’ during the election) from Florida.

Mackey was accused of conspiring with other internet influencers to spread fraudulent messages to supporters of then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton in an effort to suppress the vote in 2016.

What happens next?

The case was filed in Washington’s federal court,where Trump is expected to make his first appearance on Thursday,Washington-time.

For more than two years,judges in that courthouse — which sits near the Capitol — have been hearing the cases of the hundreds of Trump supporters accused of participating in the January 6 riot — many of whom have said they were deluded by the election lies pushed by Trump and his allies.

Trump has signalled that his defence may rest,at least in part,on the idea that he truly believed the election was stolen,saying in a recent social media post:“I have the right to protest an Election that I am fully convinced was Rigged and Stolen,just as the Democrats have done against me in 2016,and many others have done over the ages.”

But prosecutors have amassed a significant amount of evidence showing that Trump was repeatedly told he lost.

Trump “was notified repeatedly that his claims were untrue — often by the people on whom he relied for candid advice on important matters,and who were best positioned to know the facts and he deliberately disregarded the truth,” the indictment says.

Trump is already scheduled to stand trial in March in the New York case stemming from hush-money payments made during the 2016 campaign and in May in the federal case in Florida stemming from classified documents found at his Mar-a-Lago estate.

An updated indictment in the classified documents case that was unsealed last week added new charges involving accusations that Trump tried to getMar-a-Lago surveillance footage deleted after it was requested by investigators.

AP

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