Donald Trump announced this week that he has been notified that he is a target of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s investigation into the events of January 6, 2021. That suggests he will likely face charges in the coming days for his role in the first uprising on American soil since the Civil War. The attempt to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, which had been originated and led by the then president, was the culmination of a series of attacks on our democracy by him and his allies, using increasingly desperate methods to undermine our elections and institutions of government.

Smith’s central investigation concerns Trump’s alleged crimes against the Constitution and the nation itself. Even with other pending charges against Trump in New York and in Smith’s classified documents case, this prosecution will force him to be convicted of his worst offenses: those against our democracy itself.

While we should not downplay the gravity of the other crimes Trump has been and may be accused of, this behavior is different because it is closely and inextricably linked to his occupation of our highest office. This would be an indictment for crimes he allegedly committed

as president

in return for

we, the people

.

Everything we have seen from the Special Counsel leads us to believe that he understands the seriousness of these acts and will bring charges that are both efficient and equal to their magnitude. As we outlined in a model prosecution memo we developed with a bipartisan group of experts, we expect the charges to be targeted and serious.

Like the allegations from Smith’s classified documents, including an alleged Trump co-conspirator, a Jan. 6 indictment may involve a few people referred to the Justice Department by the House committee that investigated the attack on the Capitol. In addition to Trump, we think it’s possible charges will come against two attorneys referred to the department, John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro.

While the committee also referred another Trump attorney, Rudy Giuliani, and former White House

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canceled

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Hard Mark Meadows to the Justice Department, it is not clear that either will be charged any time soon. While Smith may follow up the expected indictment with separate charges against others, he will likely keep the charges against the former president streamlined. Indeed, it could only be dealing with Trump while referring to one or more unindicted co-conspirators.

We also expect Smith to charge only the central crimes Trump and his allies are suspected of over the course of a months-long plan to overthrow our democracy. It would not be surprising to see allegations related to the plans to submit fraudulent electoral votes to Congress, which could be viewed as a conspiracy to defraud the United States of organizing elections. The preparation and submission of these false voter rolls was an important step in the plan to overturn the election.

The fake voter plot was also clearly illegal and relatively easy to prove. We’ve already seen how seriously it’s taken in other jurisdictions: On Tuesday, the Michigan attorney general charged 16 bogus voters with filing forged certificates for Trump. Smith will not have missed this crucial part of the arrangement.

When it became clear that Congress would not accept these alternate voters, Trump and his co-conspirators sought to use them to delay and ultimately obstruct the constitutionally mandated congressional certification of the Jan. 6 election. We expect that special counsel will also file charges for that, perhaps as an unlawful obstruction of official proceedings. At the time, Trump’s primary goal was not to get the slates accepted, but rather to clear the way for Vice President Mike Pence to delay or prevent Congressional certification of Joe Biden’s election.

When that also failed, Trump’s latest ploy to overturn the 2020 election was to provoke a violent uprising to physically force Congress to stop counting the electoral votes and delay the transfer of power for the first time in American history. While we don’t expect Smith to overlook the importance of the attack on the Capitol, we’re less sure he’ll file specific charges for the riot rather than the broader line of conduct.

Trump’s encouragement of the attack could be accused of inciting an insurrection and providing aid or comfort to insurgents. But his behavior also constituted a conspiracy against members of Congress, the Vice President, and indeed every voter who voted for Biden. Thus, it can also be sued under federal statutes that prohibit conduct that undermines privileges or rights guaranteed by the Constitution or laws of the United States.

While Trump, like all defendants, has the legal right to be presumed innocent until proven guilty, we believe the special counsel has more than enough evidence to win convictions for such charges. This is especially true if, as we expect, he focuses on the central alleged crimes we mentioned above and detailed in our memo.

This would not be a partisan charge, despite Trump’s attempts to portray it as such. It is the result of thousands of hours of work by dedicated career investigators and prosecutors. Ultimately, we’re here only because of Trump’s own transgressions.

The former president conspired to overturn the 2020 election. He tried to advance lists of fraudulent voters; he then tried to bully his vice president into unilaterally overturning the election; and when all that failed, he raised a mob of armed supporters and put them on the convention.

Trump repeatedly attacked our democratic institutions and our right to elect our leaders. If he is criminally prosecuted for this, he has no one to blame but himself.

Noah Bookbinder is the president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW). Norm Eisen is a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution.