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Trump may have engaged in ‘criminal conspiracy’

A US committee has said that the evidence it has gathered suggests that former president Donald Trump “may have engaged in criminal and/or fraudulent acts” as part of efforts to overturn the 2020 election result.

A select committee of the US House of Representatives is investigating the events surrounding the riot at the US Capitol on 6 January last year.

In a court filing, it said that there was, at minimum, “a good-faith basis” for concluding that Trump had obstructed, or attempted to obstruct, an official proceeding.

The ‘official proceeding’ refers to the counting of votes in the presidential election by the electoral college.

Trump ‘used Pence’

“The evidence supports an inference that President Trump, and members of his campaign, knew he had not won enough legitimate state electoral votes to be declared the winner of the 2020 presidential election,” the filing said, adding that he nevertheless sought to use vice-president Mike Pence to manipulate the results in his favour.

“The president repeatedly asked the vice-president to exercise unilateral authority illegally, as presiding officer of the Joint Session of Congress, to refuse to count electoral votes,” the committee stated.

The committee also suggested that it had a basis for concluding that Trump and members of his campaign engaged in “a criminal conspiracy to defraud the United States”, in violation of the US constitution.

“In addition to the legal effort to delay the certification, there is also evidence that the conspiracy extended to the rioters engaged in acts of violence at the Capitol,” it said.

The document was filed in federal court in Los Angeles as part of the committee's dispute with John Eastman, a lawyer who advised Trump on a plan to invalidate election results in key battleground states.