A lawyer argued that mass riots triggered by Trump's power grab could be crushed by US troops: indictment

• The new indictment against Donald Trump describes how he tried to stay in power after losing the 2020 election.
• One White House lawyer warned of mass riots if he remained in office after Inauguration Day.

As Donald Trump tried to remain in power following his 2020 election loss, some lawyers tried to dissuade him.

In a conversation on January 3, 2021 — days before Congress was set to certify now-President Joe Biden as the victor of the 2020 election — one deputy White House counsel had a warning.

He said that, if Trump remained in office on inauguration day, "there would be riots in every major city in the United States."

But Jeffrey Clark, an alleged co-conspirator in the new indictment against Trump and a top Justice Department lawyer at the time, had a different answer: Call in the troops.

"That's why there's an Insurrection Act," Clark responded to the deputy White House counsel, according to the indictment against Trump unsealed by a federal grand jury in Washington, DC on Thursday.

The law, which has been invoked only a handful of times in the past century, authorizes the US president to order the military to quell unrest within the United States.

The new indictment brought four criminal counts against Trump, alleging the former president broke laws by conspiring to stop Congress from certifying the results of the 2020 election.

While Trump is the only defendant, the indictment alleges six co-conspirators helped Trump carry out his scheme. The document refers to co-conspirator 4 as a Justice Department official who worked on civil matters but nonetheless tried to use his position to "open sham election crime investigations and influence state legislatures with knowingly false claims of election fraud" — an apparent reference to Clark, who led the environmental law division of the Justice Department during the Trump administration.

The indictment details some of Clark's other activities around the time Trump plotted to overturn the election, much of which has been previously reported in media outlets and detailed in the House Select Committee's investigation into the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

On the same day that Clark suggested using the Insurrection Act, according to the indictment, Clark had also maneuvered to try to make himself Acting Attorney General.

Clark told the Acting Attorney General at the time, Jeffrey Rosen, that Trump wanted to appoint him into Rosen's position.

Rosen "responded that he would not accept being fired by a subordinate and immediately scheduled a meeting" with Trump, the indictment says.

Later that evening, Trump relented on his plan to make Clark the top law enforcement official in the country "only when he was told that it would result in mass resignations at the Justice Department and of his own White House Counsel," the indictment says.

The DC Bar may soon strip Clark of his law license over his attempts to overturn the election results.

Congress weighed whether to change the Insurrection Act

The new indictment against Trump was brought by Justice Department Special Counsel Jack Smith, who's also overseeing federal charges against the ex-president for his hoarding of government documents.

"The attack on our nation's capital on January 6, 2021, was an unprecedented assault on the seat of American democracy. As described in the indictment, it was fueled by lies," Smith said at a press conference Thursday. "Lies by the defendant targeted at obstructing a bedrock function of the US government, the nation's process of collecting, counting, and certifying the results of the presidential election."

Following Trump's time in office, some members of Congress weighed whether to amend the Insurrection Act out of fear that Trump, who is running to regain the presidency in the 2024 election, could ultimately invoke it.

A viral rumor ahead of Biden's inauguration suggested that he had already invoked it in secret as part of a last-ditch effort to stay in power. Michael Flynn, a prominent conspiracy theorist, and Trump's first national security advisor, reportedly pressured him to use it to seize voting machines. And some rioters at the Capitol, such as Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, publicly asked Trump to invoke the law.

Trump had repeatedly threatened to use the Insurrection Act during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. His aides drafted a proclamation to use the law, according to The New York Times, but Trump never followed through.

Even as Trump considered putting Clark in charge of the Justice Department, he knew he truly lost the election, according to the indictment.

Sandwiched between meetings with lawyers, Trump had a meeting with Gen. Mark Milley about "an overseas national security issue," the indictment says.

Trump believed it was too late to act on the issue because his presidency would be ending soon, according to the indictment. It would be Biden's problem.

"Yeah, you're right, it's too late for us," Trump told Milley, according to the indictment. "We're going to give that to the next guy."