Trump indicted on four counts by grand jury

Former President Donald Trump was charged with four counts by a federal grand jury into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Mark Kokanovich, former federal prosecutor, joined Arizona Horizon to discuss more on the indictment.

“This is big news; it’s not not unexpected news. It’s news that we’ve been expecting. Again, unprecedented that we have a former president who has been indicted yet again. We’ve never had a former president indicted ever before, and Donald Trump continues to rack up these indictments. This the most serious indictment to date, not to diminish the other indictments; those are serious as well,” Kokanovich said.

Kokanovich said the charges are known as “the 371 conspiracy,” which is the bread and butter of the white collar fraud prosecutions.

“It’s any deceitful attempt to defraud the United States, and this certainly qualifies when you are trying to overturn an election through clear fraud and misstatements, things that you know aren’t true,” Kokanovich said.

According to Kokanovich, the indictment found that Former President Trump was told by his top advisors that what he was saying was false in order to try and drum up opposition against the election.

“Even President Trump himself is quoted as saying some of these allegations are crazy, and yet he himself repeated them as if they were true, knowing that they were crazy and false,” Kokanovich said.

Many of Trump’s co-conspirators have already faced legal consequences, and six of them are listed without being named in the indictment, Kokanovich said. The state of Arizona, among other states, played an important role in the indictment.

“Arizona’s section is considerable, and there’s a specific emphasis on the efforts that were being used to try to convince the Speaker of the House at the time, Rusty Bowers, to interfere with the election and overturn the election, and to his credit, he refused to succumb to that pressure. When you have the President of the United States and his supporters calling on you, that’s a significant amount of pressure to bear, and yet he stood firm and said that he saw no evidence,” Kokanovich said.

This is the most consequential of Trump’s indictments. Kokanovich said he encourages everyone to read the indictment and come to their own conclusions.