This March, former President Donald Trump is scheduled to begin standing trial on three federal conspiracy charges and one federal obstruction charge in connection with efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Joe Biden.

The federal indictment alleges that, while carrying out a criminal conspiracy to defraud the U.S., Trump worked to interfere with the federal government’s counting of votes; that he obstructed the Jan. 6, 2021, certification of Biden’s win; and that he worked to deny voters the right to have their votes counted.

Central to the criminal case, which is being led by special counsel Jack Smith, are firsthand accounts from unlikely sources: A number of Trump’s fellow Republicans, who testified in 2022 before the House Select Committee investigating the Jan. 6 Capitol attack about their direct experiences with Trump as he attempted to remain in power.

Many of those Republicans speak out further in the documentary Democracy on Trial, a 2.5-hour FRONTLINE special investigating the roots of the federal criminal case against Trump, his defense — including the pursuit of absolute immunity — and the implications for democracy. 

Watch the Full Documentary: Democracy on Trial

In the above excerpt, Rusty Bowers, a longtime Arizona Republican who supported Trump’s 2020 re-election campaign, shares a candid account of being on the receiving end of one prong of Trump’s alleged multilayered effort to subvert the 2020 election: a pressure campaign on local officials following his loss.

Bowers, who was then speaker of the Arizona House of Representatives, describes a phone call before his state’s certification of Biden’s victory in which Trump and his then-lawyer Rudy Giuliani asked Bowers to swap in electors for Trump, citing cases of voter fraud for which they could provide no evidence.

“Well. For them to say to me, ‘Yeah, we just want you to throw out those electors and put in Trump’s,’ I’m thinking, ‘Have I gone to another planet?’ I mean, it’s like, ‘What? I’m not gonna do that!’” Bowers tells FRONTLINE. “I wanted him to win, okay, so what? … I’m not gonna cheat to win.”

“I flat-out said, ‘You’re asking me to break my oath. I swore an oath — I’m not gonna break it, period, not gonna break it,’” Bowers says.

Read & Watch: FRONTLINE’s Extended Interview with Rusty Bowers

As the documentary reports, that call is now part of the criminal conspiracy outlined in the federal indictment.

“If you are calling a state official, and you’re asking them to nullify lawful votes, and to replace them with unlawful votes, that is squarely within federal statutes regarding election conspiracy,” David French, a conservative columnist at The New York Times and a former attorney, tells FRONTLINE.

As the excerpt goes on to recount, soon after the call, Giuliani and his associates arrived in  Arizona and met with Bowers in person. When Bowers pressed them to provide proof of their voter fraud claims, Bowers told FRONTLINE Giuliani grew frustrated.

In what Bowers describes as “a rocket’s red glare moment,” he recalls Giuliani saying, “‘You know, we’ve got a lot of theories, we just don’t have the evidence.’”

Bowers was incredulous: “Like, wow, you gotta be kidding,” he says. “This is the clown show — they’re out hunting, they’re trying to find something, and they’re wanting us to participate in this, and he says that? Holy moly, we can’t do this stuff, you know?”

Giuliani refused to answer questions about his conversations with Bowers before the Jan. 6 committee. Trump, who is now the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, has claimed that the cases against him are politically motivated, and pleaded not guilty to the four federal criminal charges in the 2020 election case. In their filings, Trump’s lawyers have argued that he’s absolutely immune from prosecution because he was doing his job as president when he worked to change the election results. An appeals court is now considering the immunity question.

The pressure campaign Bowers described is just one of the actions by Trump that are cited in the federal indictment and explored throughout the documentary. In the big picture, the documentary reports, the federal government’s case isn’t about the legality or illegality of the individual actions themselves, but what prosecutors allege those actions were done in support of: a conspiracy to defraud the U.S.

“Whether or not a particular act that the president is alleged to have engaged in is in and of itself a crime isn’t really going to be the question at that trial. It’s going to be whether that act was in furtherance of a criminal objective,” former senior investigative counsel for the House Jan. 6 Committee Marc Harris tells FRONTLINE in the documentary. “All of the things that we’ve been talking about, they don’t have to be illegal in and of themselves — the crime is a conspiracy to defraud the United States.”

For the full story, watch Democracy on Trial, from FRONTLINE’s award-winning political team, Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica. The documentary traces the road to this uncharted moment, and examines the implications of the historic criminal case unfolding in the midst of a presidential election year.

“It is unavoidably going to be tainted with the appearance of politics at play,” says Robert Ray, a former independent counsel who investigated Bill Clinton and helped Trump get acquitted in his first Senate impeachment trial. “Obviously, that’s the card that Donald Trump will play.”

“Donald Trump is going to be the defendant and the candidate all wrapped into one,” New Yorker journalist Susan Glasser says in the film. “It’s just unprecedented.”

For the full story, watch Democracy on Trial:

The documentary premiered on Jan. 30, 2024. It is available to watch on FRONTLINE’s website, FRONTLINE’s YouTube channel, the PBS App and the PBS Documentaries Prime Video Channel. Democracy on Trial is a FRONTLINE production with the Kirk Documentary Group. The director is Michael Kirk. The producers are Michael Kirk, Mike Wiser and Vanessa Fica. The writers are Michael Kirk and Mike Wiser. The reporters are Vanessa Fica and Brooke Nelson Alexander. The editor-in-chief and executive producer of FRONTLINE is Raney Aronson-Rath.

This story has been updated.

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