It is expected that our current political leaders and those who are asking why the new cartel of emerging market leaders called BRICs…didn’t invite Nigeria to join the elite club in South Africa last week, are also following what is happening to the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. And here is why: I hope our leaders and their supporters are not just blasting the mercurial Trump without studying the strong message the trial is sending to the failing nations of the world that the rule of law is the foundation of democracy that can deliver development to the people.
One wonders if our leaders at all levels are absorbing the signal from ‘America, their America’ as the iconic J.P Clark once called them, that the current ‘Trial of Brother Trump’ is a direct attack on even a failed attempt of a leader to violate the will of his people.
Doubtless, our leaders and those who are already planning to succeed them should study carefully “the travails of democracy and the rule of law” in the United States” at the moment. Those who have been accessory after attacks on democracy and electoral processes in Nigeria should study what is happening in the United States to the extent of how to manage even the immunity clause in our Constitution.
They should know that one day ‘we the people’ will be able to prosecute our former leaders who have ruled and ruined the most populous black nation on earth. Besides, our civil society activists and members of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) who appear to have lost their old mojo should study the way the American system is teaching the struggling presidential democracies in the world that immunity clause in the constitution doesn’t mean that we cannot investigate our leaders in office.
We are now witnessing that corrupt leaders can be prosecuted for their crimes against the people as soon as they leave office. As NBA members converge on Abuja this week for their annual general meeting, I hope they will tell their newly elevated member who just assumed office as Attorney General of the Federation that we need to say goodbye to our growing culture of impunity.
Here is the lesson: Donald Trump was indicted on felony charges the other day for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election in the run-up to the violent riot by his supporters at the U.S. Capitol, with the Justice Department acting to hold him accountable for an unprecedented effort to block the peaceful transfer of presidential power and threaten American democracy.
For those who have not been following the development, the four-count indictment, the third criminal case against Trump, provided deeper insight into a dark moment that has already been the subject of exhaustive federal investigations and captivating public hearings. It chronicles a months-long campaign of lies about the election results and says that, even when those falsehoods resulted in a chaotic insurrection at the Capitol, Trump sought to exploit the violence by pointing to it as a reason to further delay the counting of votes that sealed his defeat.
Even in a year of rapid-succession legal reckonings for Trump, the current indictment, with charges including conspiring to defraud the United States government that he once led, was stunning in its allegations that a former president assaulted the “bedrock function” of democracy. It’s the first time the defeated president, who is the early front-runner for next year’s Republican presidential nomination, is facing legal consequences for his frantic but ultimately failed effort to cling to power.
“The attack on our nation’s Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy,” said Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, whose office has spent months investigating Trump. “It was fuelled by lies, lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the U.S. government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.” The Trump campaign called the charges “fake” and asked why it took two-and-a-half years to bring them.
Trump was the only person charged in that Super Tuesday’s indictment. But prosecutors obliquely referenced a half-dozen co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside of government who they said had worked with Trump to undo the election results. They also advanced legally dubious schemes to enlist slates of fake electors in battleground states won by Democrat’s Joe Biden to claim falsely that Trump had actually won them.
The indictment accuses the defeated president and his allies of trying to “exploit the violence and chaos” by calling lawmakers into the evening on Jan. 6 to delay the certification of Biden’s victory. It also cites handwritten notes from former Vice President Mike Pence that give gravitas to Trump’s relentless goading to reject the electoral votes. Pence, who is challenging Trump for the GOP presidential nomination, declined overtures from a House panel that investigated the insurrection and sought to avoid testifying before the special counsel. He appeared only after losing a court fight, with prosecutors learning that Trump in one conversation derided him as “too honest” to stop the certification.
The case stems from one of the most serious threats to American democracy in modern history. According to AP, the indictment centres on the turbulent two months after the November 2020 election in which Trump refused to accept his loss and spread lies that victory was stolen from him. The turmoil resulted in the riot at the Capitol, when Trump loyalists violently broke into the building, attacked police officers and disrupted the congressional counting of electoral votes.
In between the election and the riot, Trump allegedly urged local election officials to undo voting results in their states, pressured Pence to halt the certification of electoral votes and falsely claimed that the election had been stolen — a notion repeatedly rejected by judges. Among those lies, prosecutors say, were claims that more than 10,000 dead voters had voted in Georgia along with tens of thousands of double votes in Nevada. Each claim had been rebutted by courts or state or federal officials, the indictment says.
Prosecutors say Trump knew his claims of having won the election were false but he “repeatedly and widely disseminated them anyway — to make his knowingly false claims appear legitimate, to create an intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and to erode public faith in the administration of the election.”
The document carefully outlined arguments that Trump has been making to defend his conduct, that he had every right to challenge the results, to use the courts, even to lie about it in the process. But in stark detail, the indictment outlines how the former president instead took criminal steps to reverse the clear verdict voters had rendered.
The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department had informed him he was a target of its investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the run-up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Trump on charges, including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding. Is the Nigeria’s National Assembly studying this?
The indictment includes charges of conspiring to defraud the U.S., conspiring to obstruct an official proceeding, obstructing an official proceeding and violating a post-Civil War Reconstruction Era civil rights statute that makes it a crime to conspire to violate rights that are guaranteed by the Constitution — in this case, the right to vote. The mounting criminal cases are unfolding in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from pursuing the White House or serving as president, though Trump as president could theoretically appoint an attorney general to dismiss the charges or potentially try to pardon himself.
In New York, state prosecutors have charged Trump with falsifying business records about a hush money payoff to a porn actor before the 2016 election. The trial was set to begin in March. In Florida, the Justice Department has brought more than three dozen felony counts, accusing him of illegally possessing classified documents after leaving the White House and concealing them from investigators. That trial began in May.
Prosecutors in Georgia are also investigating efforts by Trump and his allies to reverse his election loss to Biden there. The district attorney of Fulton County announced charging decisions last week.
Smith’s team has cast a broad net as part of his federal investigation, with his team questioning senior Trump administration officials, including Pence before a grand jury in Washington. Prosecutors also interviewed election officials in Georgia, Wisconsin, Michigan and other battleground states won by Biden who were pressured by the Trump team to change voting results.
Attorney General Merrick Garland last year appointed Smith, an international war crimes prosecutor who also led the Justice Department’s public corruption section, as special counsel to investigate efforts to undo the election as well as Trump’s retention of classified documents at his Florida home, Mar-a-Lago. Although Trump has derided him as “deranged” and called him politically motivated, Smith’s past experience includes overseeing significant prosecutions against high-profile Democrats.
The Justice Department’s investigations began well before Smith’s appointment, proceeding alongside separate criminal probes into the rioters themselves. More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the insurrection, including some with seditious conspiracy.
Georgia Election Interference (State, GA)
ON August 14, 2023, Donald Trump was indicted on 13 counts in Georgia state court, including under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act. Eighteen additional co-defendants have been named in this case, including Trump’s former Chief-of-Staff, Mark Meadows and his attorneys Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman. The allegations in the indictment revolve around these individuals’ efforts to overturn the will of voters and invalidate the results of the 2020 presidential election in Georgia.
Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis conducted a years-long investigation into Donald Trump and others’ attempts to interfere with the results of the 2020 Georgia presidential election. The indictment was based on the testimony of many witnesses, as well as the written recommendations of a Special Grand Jury, which reviewed evidence and interviewed dozens of witnesses over several months.
The indictment focuses on (1) efforts to get Georgia officials to invalidate or nullify the will of Georgia voters, including by “finding votes” that did not exist, (2) the scheme to get 16 fake electors in Georgia to cast fraudulent electoral college votes for Trump, even though Trump did not win the popular vote in the state, (3) intimidating, harassing, and threatening Georgia election workers based on false accusations and in an effort to influence their testimony as witnesses, and (4) tampering with county voting machines.
The trial and travail of Trump should send signals to our new leaders who are prone to recklessness that one day we will be able to celebrate Alfred Lord Denning’s immortal words here: “…Be you never so high, the law is above you”