New Attack on Trump: Charges Amended in Trial Over Assault on US Capitol
The first person to enter Congress in Washington, DC during the January 6, 2021 riots has been sentenced to more than 4 years in prison
US prosecutors are not giving up and are finding more and more ways to put former President Donald Trump back in the dock for attacking Congress in Washington, DC on January 6, 2021. According to the American press, the special counsel of the Department of Justice prosecutor Jack Smith, who is investigating Trump, “amended the charges against the former president and Republican Party candidate in the next American presidential election.” The lawsuit, which accuses Trump of an alleged role before and during the attack on Congress by his supporters, accuses the former president of “attempting to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to current President Joe Biden.”
Attorney Smith, who has been branded a “watch-dog” by the US media, reviewed and filed new charges against Trump, slightly modified from the original ones, in the hope that they would be accepted and the trial would still go forward. The new attack on Trump follows a US Supreme Court decision, which found in early July that “former presidents, and therefore Donald Trump, are entitled to partial immunity in the performance of their functions: therefore, they cannot be sued for their official acts.” This was one of the most anticipated Supreme Court decisions to determine “whether a president can be tried for his actions while in office.”
Trump is accused of conspiring to defraud the United States, denying voters the right to have their votes counted in order to commit fraud against the United States, and conspiring to violate the rights of citizens. The allegations reformulated by Mr. Smith remained the same, but the text was changed to remove references to the fact that Trump was acting president.
As the New York Times emphasizes, in his new charges, prosecutor Smith writes that Trump “acted as a private citizen, not as president.” While the original text described Trump as “the 45th President of the United States and a candidate for re-election in 2020,” the “updated” version only lists the former president as “a candidate for president of the United States in 2020.” District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is handling the case in Washington, DC, will determine which actions are “official” and which “behaviors are not official actions.”
Meanwhile, a sentencing hearing was held Tuesday for Michael Sparks, described by US Justice as “the first person to enter the Capitol” (Congress), the official seat of the two branches of the United States legislature, during the January 6, 2021, riots in Washington, DC. Before arriving in Washington, DC, from Kentucky on January 6, 2021, Sparks published posts on some of the Internet’s social media platforms that said something like “We want a civil war” and “We need to get them out of Congress. It’s tyranny.” Sparks, charged with obstruction of official proceedings, civil disturbance, disorderly conduct, and several other offenses, was sentenced to four years and five months in prison and fined $2,000.
According to US media, Sparks’s sentence, handed down by Judge Timothy J. Kelly, was “more severe than is typical in similar cases (less than two years) because, in his view, Sparks had not yet fully realized the impact of his actions on American society.” As a reminder, during the trials following the attack on Congress, about 1500 people were accused of committing one crime or another. Those trials were condemned by Trump, who has promised to pardon most of them if he wins the November 5 presidential election.
