Ex-US President, Trump To Be Arraigned As Criminal Defendant On 2020 Election Charges Thursday
Adedokun Waliyu 
Trump’s Thursday court appearance will be in a building that had a direct view of the violence that unfurled at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The former US President, Donald Trump, will on Thursday appear before a magistrate judge in a Washington, D.C. courthouse as a criminal defendant on four felony charges preferred against him.
Trump’s Thursday court appearance will be in a building that had a direct view of the violence that unfurled at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.
The former President’s scheduled court appearance is on four criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
Trump faces four counts including conspiring to defraud the United States and to obstruct an official proceeding – the latter a charge that has already successfully been brought against rioters who breached the Capitol.
In another charge brought against the former president, prosecutors are reportedly relying on a Reconstruction-era civil rights law that prohibits conspiracies to deprive a person of their rights – in this case, “the right to vote and have one’s vote counted.”
The special counsel said in the indictment that Trump “was determined to remain in power” after losing the 2020 election and, with six unindicted co-conspirators, orchestrated a plot to overturn the results on and leading up to January 6.
Prosecutors argue that Trump exploited the “chaos” and the “violence” of January 6 in a bid to keep alive their efforts to overturn his electoral loss.
The indictment also alleges that Trump and his co-conspirators effectively tricked individuals from seven targeted states into creating and submitting certificates asserting they were legitimate electors.
It was reported that more than 1,000 Trump supporters who participated in the Capitol breach have also gone through the motions of a first appearance hearing that the former president will go through himself.
The courthouse is said to have been where judges, defendants, lawyers, witnesses, jurors and court officials have had to constantly revisit the significance of the assault on Congress and what drove it.
It is a dynamic that has weighed on Judge Beryl Howell, who recently stepped down from her role as the DC district court’s chief judge, a position that put her in charge of deciding many of the privilege disputes that ultimately allowed federal prosecutors to access key evidence in Smith’s case
“Just outside this courthouse … are visible reminders of the January 6 riot and assault on the Capitol,” Howell had reportedly said at a January 2021 sentencing of a rioter.
During the proceeding, Howell stressed that the Capitol attack “was not a peaceful protest,” but rather, it was “hundreds of people” who “came to Washington, DC, to disrupt the peaceful transfer of power.”
However, Trump has decried the ongoing special counsel investigation and charges, describing it as politically motivated since he is the front-runner for the 2024 Republican Party also known as the Grand Old Party (GOP) presidential nomination.
