Donald Trump says he has been told he’s a target in 2020 election investigation
- Trump says he got a letter from US Special Counsel Jack Smith about a grand jury investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 election result
- The counsel’s office is not confirming, but if true it would be the second federal case the office has brought against the former US president
Former US president Donald Trump said on Tuesday that US Special Counsel Jack Smith had notified him that he was a target of a criminal investigation into efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election result.
Smith “sent a letter (again, it was Sunday night!) stating that I am a TARGET of the January 6th Grand Jury investigation”, Trump wrote on Truth Social, a social media platform that he launched last year.
Trump is the front runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination. His closest competition, Florida governor Ron DeSantis, trails him by about 30 percentage points, according to Tuesday data by poll aggregator FiveThirtyEight.
Trump has already been indicted by the special counsel in a separate federal case concerning the taking and withholding of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida resort and residence. That indictment came mere days after he received that target letter.
The nature of any new charges against him are unclear, but the special counsel’s office has been examining a wide range of actions Trump and his supporters took to obstruct the legitimate transfer of power to Joe Biden, after he defeated Trump.
That includes the run-up to the January 6, 2021, riot at the US Capitol, when more than 2,000 people stormed the building in a bid to disrupt the certification of electoral votes in Congress.