The charges include conspiracy to defraud the United States government and witness tampering.
The indictment, the third criminal case filed against the former president as he seeks to win back the White House in 2024, follows a long-running federal investigation into plans by Trump and his allies to overturning the peaceful transfer of power and keeping him in power despite a decisive defeat by Joe Biden.
Even in a year of rapid legal trials for Trump, Tuesday's criminal case was particularly stunning in its allegations that a former president attacked the foundations of democracy in a frantic and ultimately unsuccessful effort to cling to power.
Federal prosecutors say Donald Trump was 'determined to stay in power' through plots that targeted a 'fundamental function of the U.S. federal government: the nation's process of collecting, counting and certifying presidential election results' .
Trump is scheduled to appear in court Thursday before U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan.
The criminal case comes as Trump leads the pack of Republicans vying to win their party's presidential nomination. The move is sure to be dismissed by the former president and his supporters – and even some of his rivals – as just another politically motivated pursuit. Yet these accusations stem from one of the most serious threats to American democracy in modern history.
They focus on the turbulent two months following the November 2020 election, during which Trump refused to accept his defeat and spread lies that the victory was stolen from him. The unrest culminated in the U.S. Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, when Trump loyalists broke into the building, attacked police officers, and disrupted the electoral vote count in Congress.
Between the election and the riots, Trump urged local election officials to overturn voting results in their states, pressured former Vice President Mike Pence to suspend certification of electoral votes, and falsely claimed the election was stolen – a notion repeatedly rejected by the judges. .
The indictment had been expected since Trump said in mid-July that the Justice Department informed him he was the target of its lengthy Jan. 6 investigation. A bipartisan House committee that spent months investigating the events leading up to the Capitol riot also recommended prosecuting Trump on charges including aiding an insurrection and obstructing an official proceeding.
The growing criminal prosecution of Trump – not to mention multiple civil cases – is taking place in the heat of the 2024 race. A conviction in this case, or any other, would not prevent Trump from running for the White House or from be president.
In New York, state prosecutors accused Trump of falsifying business records regarding a hush money payment to a porn actor before the 2016 election. The trial begins in late March.
In Florida, the Justice Department brought more than three dozen counts against Trump, accusing him of illegally possessing classified documents after leaving the White House and hiding them from the government. The trial begins at the end of May.
The latest federal indictment against Trump focuses heavily on actions taken in Washington, and the trial will be held there, in a courthouse located between the White House he once occupied and the Capitol his supporters have once taken by storm. No trial date has been set.
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Associated Press writers Colleen Long, Zeke Miller, Lindsay Whitehurst and Michael Kunzelman in Washington contributed to this report.
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