“SHOULD NEVER BE PRESIDENT”
The new conspiracy charges raise the prospect of Trump being further embroiled in legal proceedings at the height of what is expected to be a bitter presidential campaign.
The plot allegedly included attempts to pressure Mike Pence into throwing out Electoral College votes at the Jan 6 joint session of Congress called to certify Biden’s win, which the vice president eventually refused to do.
“I had no right to overturn the election,” Pence, who is also seeking the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, said Wednesday.
“Anyone who asks someone else to put themselves over the Constitution should never be president of the United States again,” he told reporters in Indianapolis.
Although Trump’s arraignment will be before a magistrate judge, the actual case is to be heard by US District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan, an appointee of former Democratic president Barack Obama, who has handed down some of the stiffest sentences in cases involving Capitol riot participants.
Chutkan, 61, also has a legal history with Trump – she ruled against him in a November 2021 case.
Trump had filed a lawsuit asserting executive privilege to block documents from being handed over to a congressional committee investigating the attack on the Capitol by his supporters.
He was no longer in the White House at the time, and Chutkan dismissed the suit, saying the former president’s argument “appears to be premised on the notion that his executive power ‘exists in perpetuity.'”
“But Presidents are not kings, and Plaintiff is not President,” Chutkan wrote.
As president, Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives for seeking political dirt on Biden from Ukraine and over the events of Jan 6 – but he was acquitted by the Senate both times.
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