Yesterday afternoon, Donald Trump formally denied any guilt in the four federal conspiracy charges against him for his attempted coup after losing the 2020 election.

To be very clear, Donald Trump is fully entitled to the same rights and protections as other criminal defendants. He deserves a fair trial and must be presumed innocent until proven guilty (despite his own history of denying others that presumption).

That said, we all saw and heard the mountains of evidence presented by the congressional January 6 Committee last summer. We all watched in horror — in real time, on live TV — the unprecedented attack on the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021. And we all witnessed Trump’s silence and inaction for hours as the violence that day escalated.

Arguments that Trump was just exercising his First Amendment rights (there is no First Amendment right to carry out an illegal conspiracy to overturn an election) or that Trump really believed he won the election (despite being told that his claims of election irregularities were false by two attorneys general, the nation’s top election security official, his vice president, senior White House lawyers, his top campaign aides, and key Republican officials in swing states — all of whom wanted Trump to win) do not seem like winning defenses, to put it mildly.

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If Donald Trump is in fact found guilty on any of the four charges in this case, it will be a vital and necessary measure to deter him or anyone else from ever again trying to carry out a coup against our very democracy.

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- Robert Weissman, President of Public Citizen
 
 
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