5 takeaways from Donald Trump's (latest) indictment

Lordy there are notes.

(Donald Trump/Image via Politico)

Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday for his role in the attempted overthrow of the 2020 election.

While this wasn’t surprising — the indictment had been expected for a while now — the 45-page document is stunning in its breadth, its specificity and the clarity of the story it tells about Trump and his co-conspirators.

Make no mistake: This is the big kahuna, the grandaddy of indictments. It lays out in blunt terms how a president of the United States tried to use the levers of state and federal power to change the result of an election he didn’t like. It’s startling stuff.

I went through the whole indictment this morning and have some takeaways from it. They’re below.

But, a word of advice: You should read the indictment too. This is history.

1. Trump knew. It’s impossible to even read a page of the indictment without coming across some evidence that Donald Trump knew that what he was saying about the election was false. Time and time again in the indictment, Trump makes a claim only to be told by someone — either in the White House or the campaign — that the claim is simply not born out by facts. And yet, time and time again, he repeats the lies publicly — often via Twitter.

   The Trump argument — at least as its being framed in these early days — is that he truly believed that he had been cheated even if everyone else told him he hadn’t. It’s the old it’s-not-a-lie-if-you-believe-it thing.

   But I find it VERY hard to see that case given the number of times Trump was told — over the course of several months — that what he was saying was simply false. He would have to be unbelievably obtuse for that message not to sink in.

2. Pence as star witness. The former vice president appears to be an inveterate note-taker. Over and over again in the indictment, there are references to the contemporaneous notes that he took — and how that informed special counsel Jack Smith and his team of what was really going on.

   Pence’s notes elucidate just how much pressure he came under from Trump — especially in those final days leading up to January 6. Maybe the most damning thing we know from those notes is that Trump told Pence he was “too honest” after the VP said he did not believe that he could change the outcome of the election.

   Like him or hate him, Pence comes across as something of a hero in the pages of the indictment. (Worth noting: This may also have to do with Smith’s reliance on Pence’s notes to make the case against Trump. Everyone is a hero in their own mind/notes.) Pence repeatedly rejected the increasingly-aggressive overtures from Trump even as it became clear that the president was going to turn his vice president into a scapegoat for the failed attempt to steal the election.

   Whether he knew it or not at the time, Pence was saving the country but destroying his own political career. How much he did on that former front shines through in the pages of the indictment.

3. Jeffrey Clark is the villain. If Pence is the good guy of this story, then Clark, a top Justice Department official is the bad guy. As January 6 approached, Clark repeatedly disobeyed direct orders to avoid talking one on one to Trump. He pushed for the sending of a letter — containing any number of falsehoods in it about the election — from the Justice Department to the states in order to stop or slow the certification of the electoral college votes. He tried to strong arm the acting Attorney General into sending the letter by saying that Trump wanted to make him AG but he would decline if the letter was sent. He eventually accepted the AG position anyway(!) only to have it rescinded once it was made clear to Trump that such an appointment would cause mass resignations.

   And, in the worst moment of the entire indictment for Clark, an episode is recounted in which he is told by the deputy White House counsel that if Trump remained in office there would be “riots in every major city in the U.S.” To which Clark responded: “Well…that’s why there’s an Insurrection Act.” Jaw dropping stuff.

4. Rudy is a dolt. Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s fingerprints are all over the indictment (he’s “co-conspirator 1”). And it’s clear that Giuliani was simply a lapdog for Trump — at the beck and call of the president and willing to say and do anything —literally — that the president asked him.

   Giuliani crops up over and over again making wild claims of false electors, overcounts of votes and the like. And, he is repeatedly asked to provide evidence of the claims he is making. He never, ever comes up with any.

   It’s, in a word, pathetic.

5. Reporters got it right. One thing I was struck by in reading the indictment is how much of this we already knew. While Smith unearths a few tidbits, the main storylines are stuff that had been reported over the past two years.

   That’s a testament to good reporting — and reporting that had to weather attacks all the way along from Trump who insisted that it was all just “fake news.”