The federal civil rights law behind the Trump Jan. 6 indictment, explained

The latest federal charges against former President Donald Trump are the result of “the most egregious” actions he took in office, according to Quinta Jurecic, fellow at the Brookings Institution and senior editor at Lawfare. On Aug. 3, Trump pleaded not guilty to three counts of conspiracy and one count of obstruction, all related to the Jan. 6 insurrection.

Read the full indictment here.

PBS NewsHour digital anchor Nicole Ellis spoke with Jurecic about the case. Watch the conversation in the player above.

Here are three things to know about the charges.

Why is Trump being charged with conspiracy in the effort to overturn the 2020 election?

A conspiracy, by federal law standards, is an agreement between two or more people to violate the law.

“There needs to be what’s called an overt act in furtherance of the conspiracy. So essentially, you agreed that you were going to do something and then you went out and you took some step toward actually doing it,” Jurecic said.

These conspiracy counts include a conspiracy to defraud the United States, a conspiracy to obstruct an official proceeding and a conspiracy against rights.

These conspiracies relate to Trump’s knowingly spreading lies about the 2020 election in an effort to subvert the election process, Trump and his allies allegedly organizing to stop the certification of votes and a conspiracy to discount votes and stop people from voting.

WATCH MORE: Breaking down the charges against Trump for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election

That conspiracy against rights comes from a civil rights statute originally adopted in 1870 in an effort to stop groups like the Ku Klux Klan from terrorizing Black voters after the Civil War.

“The indictment spells out that the statute is being used to charge Trump for his efforts to prevent the vote from being counted, essentially saying that he engaged in a conspiracy to prevent Americans from voting and from their votes from being tallied accurately in such a way that Joe Biden would be rightfully confirmed as the next president of the United States,” Jurecic said.

Why is a civil rights statute applicable to Trump’s actions?

Sometimes called the ‘Ku Klux Klan Act,’ the statute used to charge Trump was adopted amid the Reconstruction era to stop racist groups from interfering with Black Americans’ right to vote.

“There is a really powerful symbolism there, you know, saying that there’s a line that we can draw between these efforts in the South to prevent a group of people from being seen fully as citizens, from sort of broadening the scope of democracy, having a functioning multiracial democracy,” she said.

Jurecic said this conspiracy against rights charge can be applied to any effort to stop people from exercising their right to vote.

“The courts have been very clear over the last century that this statute does indeed criminalize efforts to meddle with elections in any way, whether to, you know, dissuade people from voting, give them inaccurate information about voting so their votes are counted, or meddle with the vote count after the fact,” she said.

The conspiracy against rights charge means the U.S. government believes he worked with others, or co-conspirators, many of whom were left unnamed in the indictment, to stop Biden from being elected.

“The indictment alleges Trump essentially engaged in a series of plots to bully state election officials into not counting the vote properly, or stopping the vote count too soon, to bully them into accepting slates of so-called fake electors, to bully Mike Pence in his role as vice president and president of the Senate, to accepting those fake electors, or tossing the election back to the states and then eventually in ginning up the violence itself on Jan. 6,” Jurecic said.

What’s new in the indictment?

The House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack held a series of public hearings laying out a timeline and evidence to make the case that Trump interfered with the 2020 election.

“The broad thrust of what the committee uncovered [is] that Trump was told repeatedly that he had lost the election, that he decided to try to hold on to power anyway, that he pursued this through a variety of schemes – culminating ultimately in the violence at the Capitol,” Jurecic said. The committee also brought new evidence to light.

Building on the evidence gathered by the committee, this new indictment reveals that former Vice President Mike Pence kept notes of his conversations with Trump, Jurecic said.

“There are some other instances, for example, a Justice Department official who was supporting the effort to overturn the election, suggesting that Trump might be able to essentially send the military into the streets to quell riots if riots resulted after Trump seized power, which is a pretty chilling thing,” she said.

What’s next?

Trump pleaded “not guilty” to the four charges he faces at his arraignment. The next hearing in the case is set for Aug. 28.

Jurecic said sometimes people plead guilty under a plea deal to avoid a trial, but she and others believe that scenario to be unlikely with Trump.

“It’s going to be really important to watch how these criminal proceedings overlap with Trump’s presidential campaign. He’s already made it very clear that he intends to campaign on this kind of argument that he’s being persecuted and that his voters need to support him. And I think that that will be crucial to watch,” she said.

Finally, Jurecic said these latest indictments send “a very strong signal that Trump is not above the law.”

“It is really the moment of accountability that I think a lot of people have been waiting for.”

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