Insights into the two federal indictments of the former president can help those who still support him to better understand the charges and their factual basis.

If you get your news only from conservative social media posts and TV (Fox, Newsmax, OAN), you may have no idea what the real key facts and laws are in these indictments. Why? Because these news sources often restrict their coverage to what the former president says.

Want proof? Well, Fox recently paid over $750 million for broadcasting as true some of his false claims of rampant election fraud.

How can you find out what these criminal cases are really about? Easy. Read the indictments. (Just do an internet search of “Department of Justice Trump indictments”.) Of course, the former president is presumed innocent until proven guilty in a court of law. The indictments simply say what the prosecution intends to prove, and which criminal laws have allegedly been broken.

Why should you put any faith in what Jack Smith says in the indictments? Because good lawyers generally undersell their case in the pleadings, to gain the credibility they’ll need to persuade jurors of a defendant’s guilt. So when you have an experienced lawyer like Jack Smith writing indictments in two huge cases, you should count on two things:

• The proof Jack Smith has of the facts alleged in his indictments is likely overwhelming.

• Jack Smith likely has lots of additional damaging evidence not even hinted at in the indictments.

Many of you still believe that Vice President Pence had the power on Jan. 6 to declare the lame-duck president the winner of the November 2020 election he lost. But, as the Jan. 6 indictment states, when the vice president told the lame-duck president on Jan. 1, 2021 that the VP lacked the power to do this under our Constitution, the lame-duck president responded, “You’re too honest.”

That admission by the former president, my friends, is an admission that he knew he was asking the vice president to violate the very same Constitution they had both sworn to defend in their oaths of office. Similarly, the former president has suggested that he will abandon or ignore our beloved Constitution in his now-sought second term. Such conduct and statements reveal someone entirely bereft of the honor and moral principles our presidency (and our religions) demand.

The attempted coup indictment also notes the former president’s direct involvement in using his “Big Lie” of massive election fraud to create phony state certifications naming phony state electors in seven states. He planned to have these phony certifications submitted to Vice President Pence by Jan. 6, so Pence would either ignore the real certificates and declare the president the winner, or delay the count enough to create a constitutional crisis that would favor the president. Can we all agree that the real winner of an election doesn’t have to engage in complex multistate frauds to be named the winner?

But, you may say, what about the former president’s free speech defense? Well, as you already know (if you think about it), not all speech is protected free speech. Criminal frauds use lies and misrepresentations to scam the targets of the fraud. Criminal conspiracies use words to obtain the cooperation of fellow conspirators. The former president would not have committed crimes had he just stuck to his lies of rampant election fraud. But when he engaged in criminal plots to steal an election through fraudulent certifications and requested constitutional violations by others, he leapt far outside the zone of free speech protections.

Still, you may say, what if the president believed the claims of rampant election fraud made by his personally thrown-together group of lawyers (who most other lawyers referred to as incompetent crackpots)? Well, following thorough investigation, each such claim was entirely refuted by his own attorney general, by highly capable lawyers in the White House and the Department of Justice, and even by universally respected conservative constitutional scholars.

The coup indictment is also replete with specific examples of the president being shown the complete absence of any outcome-impacting election fraud. And it also notes specific times when the president himself acknowledged that he had lost. Finally, his chief Bozo attorney, Rudy Giuliani, perhaps said it best when commenting on all of the president’s election fraud claims: “We’ve got lots of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.”

In U.S. courts (unlike some in our current electorate), true facts and real laws still matter.

This is the main reason why the former president lost the over 60 election-related lawsuits he filed. Because real facts and law still matter in our courts, the former president will soon find himself serving a most well-deserved prison sentence.

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Carl Kiss is a mostly retired lawyer who lives in Enterprise.