Trump Indictment: Jan. 6 Riot Was ‘Fueled by Lies’ From Trump, Special Counsel Says (2024)

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The special counsel accused Trump of taking part in three conspiracies.

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election,” the indictment said.

The charges signify an extraordinary moment in United States history: a former president, in the midst of a campaign to return to the White House, being charged over attempts to use the levers of government power to subvert democracy and remain in office against the will of voters.

In sweeping terms, the indictment described how Mr. Trump and six co-conspirators employed a variety of means to reverse his defeat in the election almost from the moment that voting ended.

It depicted how Mr. Trump promoted false claims of fraud, sought to bend the Justice Department toward supporting those claims and oversaw a scheme to create false slates of electors pledged to him in states that were actually won by Joseph R. Biden Jr. And it described how he ultimately pressured his vice president, Mike Pence, to use the fake electors to subvert the certification of the election at a joint session of Congress on Jan. 6, 2021, that was cut short by the violence at the Capitol.

The indictment did not name the alleged co-conspirators, but the descriptions of their behavior match publicly known episodes involving prominent people around Mr. Trump.

The behavior of “Co-conspirator 1” appears to align with that of Rudolph W. Giuliani, Mr. Trump’s personal lawyer whom he put in charge of efforts to deny the transfer of power after his main campaign lawyers made clear it was over. Mr. Giuliani’s lawyer, Robert J. Costello, acknowledged in a statement that it “appears that Mayor Giuliani is alleged to be co-conspirator No. 1.”

The description of “Co-conspirator 2” tracks closely with that of John Eastman, a California law professor who served as the architect of the plan to pressure Mr. Pence.

The co-conspirators could be charged at any point, and their inclusion in the indictment — even unnamed — places pressure on them to cooperate with investigators.

Many of the details in the charges were familiar, having appeared either in news accounts or in the work of the House select committee investigating Jan. 6. There were descriptions of Mr. Trump’s attempt to install a loyalist, Jeffrey Clark, who appears to be a co-conspirator in the case, atop the Justice Department and to strong-arm the secretary of state of Georgia into finding him enough votes to win the election in that state.

There were also references to Mr. Trump posting a message on Twitter in mid-December 2020 calling for a “wild” protest in Washington on Jan. 6, and to him pressuring Mr. Pence to try to throw the election his way during the joint session of Congress that day.

But the indictment also contained some snippets of new information, such as a description of Mr. Trump telling Mr. Pence, “You’re too honest,” as the vice president pushed back on Mr. Trump’s pressure to interfere in the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.

It also included an account of Mr. Trump telling someone who asked if he wanted additional pressure put on Mr. Pence that “no one” else but him needed to speak with the vice president.

Mr. Smith, in drafting his charging document, walked a cautious path in connecting Mr. Trump to the mob attack on the Capitol. The indictment mentioned Mr. Trump’s “exploitation of the violence and chaos” at the building that day, but did not accuse him of inciting the riot.

It also laid out how Mr. Trump was repeatedly told by multiple people, including top officials in his campaign and at the Justice Department, that he had lost the election and that his claims that he had been cheated were false. That sort of evidence could help prosecutors prove their accusations by establishing Mr. Trump’s intent.

Mr. Trump’s constant claims of widespread election fraud “were false, and the defendant knew they were false,” the indictment said, adding that he was told repeatedly that his assertions were untrue.

“Despite having lost, the defendant was determined to remain in power,” the indictment said.

Mr. Trump has been summoned for his initial court appearance in the case on Thursday afternoon before a magistrate judge in Federal District Court in Washington, the special counsel’s office said. Ultimately, a trial date and a schedule for pretrial motions will be set, proceedings that are likely to extend well into the presidential campaign.

Mr. Trump’s lead lawyer on the case, John Lauro, laid out what appeared to be the beginning of his defense, telling Fox News, “I would like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations” about voter fraud “were false.”

The charges in the case came more than two and a half years after a pro-Trump mob — egged on by incendiary speeches by Mr. Trump and his allies — stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6 in the worst attack on the seat of Congress since the War of 1812.

They also came a little more than seven months after Attorney General Merrick B. Garland appointed Mr. Smith, a career federal prosecutor, to oversee both the election tampering and classified documents inquiries into Mr. Trump. They followed a series of high-profile hearings last year by the House Jan. 6 committee, which laid out extensive evidence of Mr. Trump’s efforts to reverse the election results.

Mr. Garland moved to name Mr. Smith as special counsel in November, just days after Mr. Trump declared that he was running for president again.

In a brief appearance before reporters, Mr. Smith set out what he said was the former president’s moral, as well as legal, responsibility for violence at the Capitol, saying the riot was “fueled by lies” — Mr. Trump’s lies.

Mr. Trump, the front-runner for the Republican nomination, has incorporated attacking the investigations into his campaign messaging and fund-raising. His advisers have been blunt in private conversations that they see his winning the election as crucial to undoing the charges against him.

In a statement, Mr. Trump denounced the indictment.

“Why did they wait two and a half years to bring these fake charges, right in the middle of President Trump’s winning campaign for 2024?” he said, calling it “election interference” and comparing the Biden administration to Nazi Germany.

The judge assigned to Mr. Trump’s case, Tanya S. Chutkan, has been a tough jurist in cases against Jan. 6 rioters — and in a case that involved Mr. Trump directly. Appointed by President Barack Obama, she has routinely issued harsh penalties against people who stormed the Capitol.

She also denied Mr. Trump’s attempt to avoid disclosing documents to the Jan. 6 committee, ordering him to turn over the material and writing, “Presidents are not kings.”

Mr. Trump now faces two separate federal indictments. In June, Mr. Smith brought charges in Florida accusing Mr. Trump of illegally holding on to a highly sensitive trove of national defense documents and then obstructing the government’s attempts to get them back.

The scheme charged by Mr. Smith on Tuesday in the election case played out largely in the two months between Election Day in 2020 and the attack on the Capitol. During that period, Mr. Trump took part in a range of efforts to retain power despite having lost the presidential race.

In addition to federal charges in the election and documents cases, Mr. Trump also faces legal troubles in state courts.

He has been charged by the Manhattan district attorney’s office in a case that centers on hush money payments made to the p*rn actress Stormy Daniels in the run-up to the 2016 election.

The efforts by Mr. Trump and his allies to reverse his election loss are also the focus of a separate investigation by the district attorney in Fulton County, Ga. That inquiry appears likely to generate charges this month.

It seems likely that Mr. Trump will face the prospect of at least three criminal trials next year, even as he is campaigning for the presidency. The Manhattan trial is scheduled to begin in March, while the federal documents case in Florida is set to go to trial in May.

Glenn Thrush contributed reporting.

Four takeaways from the indictment.

The indictment of the former president for trying to subvert democracy — an episode that has no precedent in American history — was issued by a federal grand jury in Washington and unsealed shortly before Mr. Smith gave his statement.

Mr. Trump has been charged with four crimes, including conspiracies to defraud the United States and to obstruct an official proceeding.

Here are four takeaways:

The indictment portrays an attack on American democracy.

Mr. Smith framed his case against Mr. Trump as one that cuts to a core function of democracy: the peaceful transfer of power.

By underscoring this theme, which he also laid out in the indictment, Mr. Smith cast his effort as not just an effort to hold Mr. Trump accountable but also to defend the very core of democracy.

Mr. Smith said the former president’s efforts to overturn the election went well beyond his First Amendment right to make claims about voter fraud. The indictment details Mr. Trump’s efforts to use the machinery of government — including his own Justice Department — to help him cling to power.

Trump was placed at the center of the conspiracy.

Mr. Smith puts Mr. Trump at the heart of three overlapping conspiracies.

These conspiracies culminated on Jan. 6, 2021, as an attempt to obstruct Congress’s role in ratifying the Electoral College outcome.

Mr. Smith argued in the indictment that Mr. Trump knew his claims about a stolen election were false. He cited a litany of episodes in which campaign advisers, White House officials, top Justice Department lawyers, speakers of statehouses and election administrators all told Mr. Trump his claims about “outcome-determinative fraud” in the election were false. Mr. Trump nonetheless kept repeating them.

Establishing that Mr. Trump knew he was lying could be important to convincing a jury to convict him. A lawyer for Mr. Trump has already signaled that his defense could rest in part on showing that he truly believed he had been cheated out of re-election.

Trump didn’t do it alone.

The indictment lists six co-conspirators, without naming or indicting them.

Based on the descriptions provided of the co-conspirators, they match the profiles of a crew of outside lawyers and advisers that Mr. Trump turned to after his campaign and White House lawyers failed to turn up credible evidence of fraud and had lost dozens of cases to challenge the election results in swing states.

After many of his core advisers told him his claims of fraud weren’t bearing out, Mr. Trump turned to lawyers who were willing to argue ever more outlandish conspiracy and legal theories to keep him in power.

These advisers included Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York; the constitutional lawyer John Eastman, who came up with the scheme to pressure Mr. Pence to block the certification of election results on Jan. 6; and Sidney Powell, the lawyer who pushed the theory that foreign nations had hacked into voting machines. Even Mr. Trump told advisers at the time that Ms. Powell’s theories sounded “crazy,” but he kept repeating them in public.

It’s unclear whether any or all of these co-conspirators will be indicted or whether they now have a period in which there’s an opportunity for them to decide to cooperate with prosecutors.

Indictments have only strengthened Trump’s hold on the Republican Party.

Mr. Trump may be on trial next year in three or four separate criminal cases — and there’s no telling what effect that might have on his general election prospects if he’s the Republican nominee. So far, the indictments appear to have had nothing but political upside for the former president.

The criminal investigations have helped consolidate Mr. Trump’s position as his party’s overwhelming front-runner in the presidential primaries.

The latest charges were Mr. Trump’s third indictment since early April. In the four months since his first indictment in New York, Mr. Trump has gained nearly 10 percentage points, according to national polling averages. During that same period, his closest rival, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, has seen his support drop to the point where he now lags Mr. Trump nationally by more than 30 percentage points and is far behind in all the early voting states.

To understand the depths of frustration that Mr. Trump’s presidential rivals are wallowing in as they helplessly watch a Republican electorate in thrall to the former president, consider a single data point from this week’s New York Times/Siena College poll.

“In a head-to-head contest with Mr. DeSantis,” The Times wrote, “Mr. Trump still received 22 percent among voters who believe he has committed serious federal crimes — a greater share than the 17 percent that Mr. DeSantis earned from the entire G.O.P. electorate.”

If Mr. Trump does well among Republican voters who already think he’s a criminal, what hope do his G.O.P. opponents have of exploiting this latest indictment?

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The five ways Trump and six co-conspirators tried to carry out an election scheme.

It outlined five distinct ways in which Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators carried out the “unlawful” scheme to overturn the election results, including organizing a false slate of electors in seven swing states that Mr. Trump lost to Joseph R. Biden. Those states included Wisconsin, Nevada and Georgia, where a local prosecutor is also scrutinizing the fake slate of electors.

According to the indictment, Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators also used false claims of election fraud to spur state lawmakers into action to “subvert the legitimate” results of the election.

“On the pretext of baseless fraud claims, the Defendant pushed officials in certain states to ignore the popular vote; disenfranchise millions of voters; dismiss legitimate electors; and ultimately, cause the ascertainment of and voting by illegitimate electors in favor of the Defendant,” the indictment said.

Mr. Trump and his co-conspirators also tried to use “the power and authority” of the Justice Department to conduct “sham election crime investigations” and fuel lies about the election. They also pressured Vice President Mike Pence to delay the certification of the election on Jan. 6, essentially seeking to enlist him in the conspiracy. (When he resisted, Mr. Trump at one point chided Mr. Pence for being “too honest.”)

Finally, according to the indictment, Mr. Trump and some of his co-conspirators stoked tension during the riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The co-conspirators “exploited the disruption by redoubling efforts to levy false claims of election fraud,” the indictment said.

Although the special counsel Jack Smith did not announce charges against any of the co-conspirators — nor are they named in the indictment — he could still be investigating their role in the plot to overturn the election results.

Conversations between Trump and Pence provided key evidence for prosecutors.

The indictment tells a lengthy narrative about Mr. Trump’s effort to force Mr. Pence to thwart President Biden from being certified by Congress as the winner in the Electoral College in the days leading up to Jan. 6, 2021. Mr. Pence had a ceremonial role overseeing the certification of the election in Congress, and Mr. Trump repeatedly urged him to use it to keep Mr. Trump in power.

Mr. Pence told him several times that doing so exceeded his authority.

In great detail and with specific dates, the indictment describes Mr. Trump as using a series of routine interactions with Mr. Pence to try to coerce him into doing what he wanted.

“On December 25, when the Vice President called the Defendant to wish him a Merry Christmas, the Defendant quickly turned the conversation to January 6 and his request that the Vice President reject electoral votes that day,” prosecutors wrote in the indictment. “The Vice President pushed back, telling the Defendant, as the Vice President already had in previous conversations, ‘You know I don’t think I have the authority to change the outcome.’”

Another instance, which Mr. Pence had in his notes, came on Dec. 29, when Mr. Trump told Mr. Pence that the Justice Department had found “major infractions” in the voting, which was false.

Then, three days later, on New Year’s Day, Mr. Trump called Mr. Pence and berated him because he opposed a lawsuit asking a judge to rule that the vice president had the authority to reject electoral votes.

“You’re too honest,” Mr. Trump told Mr. Pence, who described some of that interaction in his book, “So Help Me God,” last year.

Mr. Trump tried again on Jan. 3, the indictment says. Again, Mr. Pence pushed back.

The indictment lays out not just conversations that Mr. Trump had with Mr. Pence, but talks he had with others about Mr. Pence.

“At the meeting in the Oval Office on the night of January 3, Co-Conspirator 4 suggested that the Justice Department should opine that the Vice President could exceed his lawful authority during the certification proceeding and change the election outcome,” the indictment says.

“When the Assistant Attorney General for the Office of Legal Counsel began to explain why the Justice Department should not do so, the Defendant said, ‘No one here should be talking to the Vice President. I’m talking to the Vice President,’ and ended the discussion,” the indictment says.

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One challenge in the legal cases against Trump: Scheduling.

“The courts will have to decide how to balance the public interest in having expeditious trials against Trump’s interest and the public interest in his being able to campaign so that the democratic process works,” said Bruce Green, a Fordham University professor and former prosecutor. “That’s a type of complexity that courts have never had to deal with before.”

The complications make plain another reality: Mr. Trump’s troubles are entangling the campaign with the courts to a degree the nation has never experienced — raising tensions around the ideal of keeping the justice system separate from politics.

Already, Mr. Trump is facing a state trial on civil fraud accusations in New York in October. Another trial on whether he defamed the writer E. Jean Carroll is set to open on Jan. 15 — the same day as the Iowa caucuses. On Jan. 29, a trial begins in yet another lawsuit, this one accusing Mr. Trump, his company and three of his children of using the family name to entice vulnerable people to invest in sham business opportunities.

Because those cases are civil, Mr. Trump could choose not to attend the trials, just as he shunned an earlier lawsuit by Ms. Carroll, in which a jury found him liable for sexual abuse.

But he will not have that option in a criminal case on charges in New York that he falsified business records as part of covering up a sex scandal shortly before the 2016 election. The opening date for that trial, which will most likely last several weeks, is in late March, about three weeks after Super Tuesday, when over a dozen states vote on March 5.

In the criminal inquiry into Mr. Trump’s hoarding of sensitive documents, the federal judge overseeing the case set a trial date for May 20, 2024. That is after the bulk of the primary contests and less than two months before the start of the Republican National Convention in July.

Here are some key parts of the indictment.

Among the charges, prosecutors said that Mr. Trump tried to defraud the government, deprive people of their right to vote and obstruct an official proceeding. Each of the conspiracies were intended to target the collecting, counting and certifying of the results of the 2020 presidential election. Prosecutors wrote in the indictment that Mr. Trump was “determined to stay in power" and created an “intense national atmosphere of mistrust and anger, and erode public faith” in the country’s democratic foundations.

Mr. Trump had six co-conspirators, according to the indictment.

The indictment does not name the co-conspirators but the descriptions of them appear to match up with a number of people who were central to the investigation into election tampering conducted by prosecutors working for Mr. Smith. Among those people central to the inquiry were Rudolph W. Giuliani, a lawyer who oversaw Mr. Trump’s attempts to claim the election was marred by widespread fraud; John Eastman, a law professor who provided the legal basis to overturn the election by manipulating the count of electors to the Electoral College; Sidney Powell, a lawyer who pushed Mr. Trump to use the military to seize voting machines and rerun the election; Jeffrey Clark, a Justice Department official at the time; and Kenneth Chesebro and James Troupis, lawyers who helped flesh out the plan to use fake electors pledged to Mr. Trump in states that were won by President Biden.

Prosecutors say Mr. Trump undertook many schemes to stay in power.

The indictment points to several instances in which Mr. Trump plotted to overturn the election and sow doubt about the votes that were cast in seven states. Prosecutors said that Mr. Trump hatched his criminal scheme after the election and along with his co-conspirators executed a strategy to use “deceit in targeted states.” The indictment lists how Mr. Trump tried to sow doubt in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.

Prosecutors say Mr. Trump knew he was spreading elections lies.

Vice President Mike Pence said he saw no evidence of “outcome-determinative fraud”; senior Justice Department officials said there was no evidence to support the election fraud claims; and senior White House lawyers also told Mr. Trump the same thing. Among others who delivered a similar message were state legislators and officials as well as the courts that rejected every one of his lawsuits. The courts, prosecutors said, provided “real-time notice that his allegations were meritless.”

How much in this indictment is new?

Much of what is in the indictment is already known because of the work of journalists and the extensive investigation done by the Jan. 6 committee of the House. Still, there appeared to be some new revelations, including the conduct of Mr. Trump and Mr. Clark whom the former president tried to install as the acting attorney general before that effort was thwarted by officials at the Justice Department.

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What if Trump is elected with criminal charges still looming?

In New York, he is accused of falsifying business records in connection with a hush money payment while the special counsel, Jack Smith, also previously accused Mr. Trump of mishandling national security secrets.

Were a federal case to still be pending on Inauguration Day, Mr. Trump could simply use his power as president to force the Justice Department to drop the matter, as he has suggested he might do.

(It is not yet clear when a trial over his efforts to overturn the 2020 election will start. The classified documents case, which will be tried in Florida, has a date set for May, but that could change depending on how pretrial arguments unfold.)

But the Constitution does not give presidents supervisory authority over state prosecutors, so that would not work for the state inquiries in New York and Georgia, where the Fulton County district attorney, Fani Willis, has indicated she is nearing a decision on charges in her own election-interference investigation.

The most Mr. Trump could probably do is try to delay a trial over any state charges that may be pending. In the past, the Justice Department has taken the position that criminal legal proceedings against a president while he is in office would be unconstitutional because it would interfere with his ability to perform his duties.

There is no definitive Supreme Court ruling on the matter because the issue has never arisen before. In 1997, the Supreme Court allowed a federal lawsuit against President Bill Clinton to proceed while he was in office — but that was a civil case, not a criminal one.

Mr. Trump’s trial in New York on charges of bookkeeping fraud is scheduled to begin in March. The timing of any trial in Georgia is an open question.

If Mr. Trump were to be convicted in one or more cases, he is almost certain to pursue appeals, delaying any sentencing and all but ensuring he is not incarcerated by Inauguration Day. The question would then arise of what would happen if he took office for a second term.

Should Mr. Trump be convicted in a federal case, he would likely then move to pardon himself, a power he claimed in 2018 that he had the “absolute right” to wield. It is not clear whether a self-pardon would be legitimate.

No text in the Constitution bars a president from doing so. But in 1974, the Justice Department issued a terse legal opinion stating that President Richard Nixon did not appear to have the authority to pardon himself “under the fundamental rule that no one may be a judge in his own case.”

But the opinion did not explain what transformed that principle into an unwritten limit on the power the Constitution bestows on presidents. Legal experts have disagreed on that question, but no president has ever claimed he was pardoning himself, so it has never been tested in court.

In such a scenario, Mr. Trump is almost certain to use his control of the Justice Department to ensure that it sides with him on whether a self-pardon is legitimate. If prosecutors do not challenge a self-pardon, it is not clear who else would have legal standing to pursue the matter.

Should Mr. Trump be convicted in New York or Georgia, he could not pardon himself because the Constitution does not empower a president to forgive state offenses. That is instead a power wielded by governors. If the relevant governor did not pardon him, he could seek a federal court order delaying any incarceration — or requiring his release from prison — while he is the sitting president, on constitutional grounds.

Yet another possibility is that if he is incarcerated, upon the start of his second term, he could be removed from office under the 25th Amendment as “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office.”

But that outcome would require the majority of a president’s cabinet, along with the vice president, to make such a determination. Among the questions that possibility would raise is who would qualify as a cabinet member if the Senate has not confirmed any new political appointees by Mr. Trump.

More than 1,000 people have been charged in connection with the Jan. 6 attack.

More than 350 people charged so far stand accused of assaulting police officers, including about 110 who used a deadly or dangerous weapon. Another 310 people have been charged with the obstruction of an official proceeding, the go-to count that prosecutors have used to describe how members of the mob disrupted the certification of the election that was taking place inside the Capitol at a joint session of Congress.

More 100 rioters have gone to trial in Federal District Court in Washington, starting with Guy Wesley Reffitt, a Texas militiaman who was convicted in March 2022 of helping to lead an advance against the police that resulted in the first violent breach of the Capitol.

The vast majority of those who have faced trial have been found guilty of at least one crime or another; only two people — a former government contractor from New Mexico and a low-level member of the Oath Keepers militia — have been acquitted of all the charges they faced.

About 560 defendants have been sentenced. Of those, more than 330 have been ordered to serve some amount of time in prison.

The most serious and complex trials so far have involved the Oath Keepers and the Proud Boys, another far-right organization. The leaders of the groups — Stewart Rhodes and Enrique Tarrio — were both convicted of seditious conspiracy along with some of their lieutenants.

Mr. Rhodes, who founded the Oath Keepers in 2009, was sentenced in May to 18 years in prison — the longest sentence given so far in any Jan. 6 criminal case.

Mr. Tarrio is expected to be sentenced this summer.

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Trump has spent two years labeling the Capitol attack as a ‘love-fest.’

Mr. Trump’s initial tweet as the rioters broke into the building was an attack on Vice President Mike Pence for not rejecting the proceedings himself. And when Mr. Trump finally did urge the mob to go home, the effort was seen as tepid at best.

The day after the violence, after intense criticism that his initial actions had not been enough, Mr. Trump released a video in which he said, “Like all Americans, I am outraged by the violence, lawlessness and mayhem.”

But starting two months after he left office, Mr. Trump gave interviews to book authors in which he defended himself. And in his relatively few public comments on what happened, Mr. Trump described the day in which a mob broke into the Capitol and police officers were injured as a “love-fest.”

His main expression of concern was not for the Capitol Police officers working that day, but for a woman named Ashli Babbitt, one of his supporters, who was shot and killed as she tried to enter a locked area of the Capitol.

By early 2022, Mr. Trump had his own social-media site, Truth Social, on which he regularly maintained that there was “love” among the crowd and tried to give the violent day a patina of positivity.

As charges began mounting against hundreds of people accused of being part of the mob that day, Mr. Trump began to publicly suggest he might pardon them if won the presidency again. Eventually, he began helping to raise money for those detained on charges related to the Capitol attack and criticized the conditions under which they were held.

More recently, he recorded a song with a group of prisoners called the J6 Choir.

Trump has a long history of casting the Justice Department as a villain.

“These un-American witch hunts will fail and President Trump will be re-elected to the White House so he can save our country from the abuse, incompetence and corruption that is running through the veins of our country at levels never seen before,” the Trump campaign said in the statement.

The line of attack by Mr. Trump, the Republican front-runner for president, was a familiar one. It dates back to at least 2017, when he began alluding to a “deep state” plot by the Justice Department.

Back then, he was fixated on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server to store classified material and questioned why his opponent in the 2016 election had not been criminally charged.

“Why aren’t our deep State authorities looking at this?” Mr. Trump wrote in a post on Twitter in November 2017, tagging Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity. “Rigged & corrupt?”

The term “deep state” had appeared to be a riff on remarks that Stephen K. Bannon, his chief strategist, made just after Mr. Trump’s inauguration. Mr. Bannon, at a conservative gathering, said that the “deconstruction of the administrative state” was underway.

But as Mr. Trump’s own grip on power became threatened — by his first impeachment in 2019 and a two-year investigation into Russian election meddling — he broadened the narrative. His campaign speeches became peppered with accusations that career civil servants had conspired to undermine his presidency. His rhetoric became more vitriolic, calling those officials “absolute scum” and comparing them to Nazis. His campaign invoked “Nazi Germany” again on Tuesday.

Mr. Trump was so consumed with conspiracy theories about the “deep state” that his administration weeded out Cabinet members and career civil servants it deemed to be disloyal at prolific rates. Scores left under their own volition.

By one account, the Trump administration had lost nearly 1,200 senior career service employees in its first 18 months — roughly 40 percent more than during President Barack Obama’s first 18 months in office.

He relied on the narrative again when he was impeached a second time after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack at the U.S. Capitol.

And now, with criminal indictments against him piling up as he seeks to return to the White House, he has further demonized the federal government. He has characterized each successive indictment as examples of the Justice Department being weaponized against him, pivoting from the broader “deep state” conspiracy to one aimed squarely at the Democrats now in power.

His Republican rivals have largely echoed his narrative. “As President, I will end the weaponization of government,” Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, Mr. Trump’s top 2024 rival, said on Twitter moments after the third indictment was announced on Tuesday.

And his allies in Congress and conservative media have always been quick to adopt his talking points. At times, they also cast themselves as victims of the “deep state.”

An example: In 2018, Representative Jim Jordan, the House Freedom Caucus firebrand, blamed liberal bureaucrats in the government amid criticism that he had failed to report sexual misconduct at Ohio State University while he was a wrestling coach there.

Mr. Jordan is now chairman of a House subcommittee on the weaponization of the federal government, which Republicans created this year.

Though none have gone as far as him, Mr. Trump is not the first politician who has sought to discredit the Justice Department, which includes the F.B.I., often as the walls of justice closed in on them.

• As his presidency began to unravel in 1974, Richard M. Nixon warned the Justice Department to back off its investigation into Watergate, when a White House “plumbers” unit broke into the Democratic National Committee’s offices in Washington, D.C. He resigned about four months later.

• Republicans cried foul when, four days before the 1992 presidential election, a special prosecutor brought an additional one-count indictment against Caspar W. Weinberger, the former defense secretary, accusing him of lying to Congress about the Iran-contra Affair. President George H.W. Bush’s G.O.P. allies blamed the timing of the indictment for his defeat by the Democratic challenger Bill Clinton. Mr. Bush had been vice president in the Reagan administration during the scandal.

• Democrats and President Bill Clinton’s lawyer relentlessly attacked the impartiality of Ken Starr, the independent counsel who led the investigation into the president’s affair with Monica Lewinsky, during impeachment proceedings in 1998. They accused him of “overkill” and claimed he was leaking information to the news media. At the request of the Justice Department, his oversight role had been expanded from beyond his initial inquiry into the Whitewater deal. Mr. Clinton was impeached mostly along party lines in the House, but acquitted by the Senate.

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DeSantis suggests Trump can’t get a fair trial in the D.C. ‘swamp.’

“Washington, D.C. is a ‘swamp’ and it is unfair to have to stand trial before a jury that is reflective of the swamp mentality,” Mr. DeSantis wrote on Twitter. “One of the reasons our country is in decline is the politicization of the rule of law. No more excuses — I will end the weaponization of the federal government.”

The judge assigned to Mr. Trump, who was indicted on charges related to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election, is Tanya S. Chutkan, a D.C. District Court judge who has routinely issued harsh penalties in Jan. 6-related cases against people who stormed the Capitol.

The Republican candidates, who have sought to overtake the former president’s substantial lead in early polls with little success, have campaigned amid a backdrop of Mr. Trump’s legal battles that have sucked up valuable airtime and dominated media coverage. Here’s what the others said on Tuesday:

• Former Vice President Mike Pence, who was present at the Capitol during the Jan. 6 attack and was the target of some rioters — and whom the indictment describes as a key target of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign to overturn the 2020 election — said that the indictment “serves as an important reminder: Anyone who puts himself over the Constitution should never be President of the United States.”

• Senator Tim Scott of South Carolina, in a statement to The Times, echoed a common refrain among Republicans: that the Justice Department, under the Biden administration, had been weaponized against Mr. Biden’s political opponents. He referenced the case against Hunter Biden, Mr. Biden’s son, and said, “We’re watching Biden’s D.O.J. continue to hunt Republicans while protecting Democrats.”

• Vivek Ramaswamy, a tech entrepreneur and one of Mr. Trump’s most vocal defenders in the 2024 field, called the indictment “un-American.” He sought to absolve Mr. Trump of any responsibility for the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol and reiterated his previous promise that, if elected, he would pardon Mr. Trump. “The corrupt federal police just won’t stop until they’ve achieved their mission: eliminate Trump,” he said, and added: “Trump isn’t responsible for what happened on Jan 6. The real cause was systematic and pervasive censorship of citizens in the year leading up to it.”

• Former Representative Will Hurd of Texas, who has refused to pledge his support to Mr. Trump if he is the eventual nominee, was the first candidate to respond to the new indictment. “Let me be crystal clear: Trump’s presidential bid is driven by an attempt to stay out of prison and scam his supporters into footing his legal bills,” Mr. Hurd wrote. “His denial of the 2020 election results and actions on Jan. 6 show he’s unfit for office.”

• Former Gov. Asa Hutchinson of Arkansas, who is running an explicitly anti-Trump campaign, reiterated his earlier calls for Mr. Trump to quit his campaign, calling him “morally responsible for the attack on our democracy.” Mr. Hutchinson said that if Mr. Trump does not drop out of the race, “voters must choose a different path.”