Trump indicted in fourth case, over attempts to overturn 2020 election loss in Georgia
Donald Trump was indicted on criminal charges on Monday for attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 presidential election. The indictment is the fourth facing the former president as he mounts another campaign for the White House.
Fani Willis, the district attorney in Fulton County, Georgia, where much of Atlanta is located, secured the indictment from a grand jury. Trump was charged alongside 18 other defendants — including former attorneys Rudolph Giuliani, John Eastman, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis, as well as his former White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows — with engaging in a criminal conspiracy to illegally overturn the state’s presidential election results.
Willis charged the group under the state’s racketeering statute, a felony that could result in a minimum of five years in prison for the convicted.
The indictment illustrates a detailed picture of Trump and his co-defendants working as an organized unit — a requirement for a charge under the racketeering law, known as RICO — to overturn the election results in Georgia through various means, including the recruitment of a group of loyalists who would challenge official representatives to the Electoral College.
All 19 defendants worked “through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere, to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office beginning on January 20, 2021,” Willis said in a press conference late on Monday evening.
“Specifically, the participants in association took various actions in Georgia and elsewhere to block the counting of votes of presidential electors,” she said.
Willis said the defendants have until Aug. 25 to surrender themselves for arraignment, and that she hopes to try the case within six months. “Everyone charged in this bill of indictment is presumed innocent,” she added.
The 97-page indictment opens noting that Trump “lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia.”
READ MORE: Trump’s fourth indictment, in Georgia, could present the biggest threat to his freedom
“Trump and the other Defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment continues. “That conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of racketeering activity in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states.”
In the months following the November 2020 vote, Trump attempted to pressure local officials in battleground states to overturn their official vote counts.
In a call with Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, on Jan. 2, 2021, Trump attempted to convince him to change the state’s election results by “finding” enough votes to declare him the victor, an act that also led Willis to charge Trump with the felony offenses of soliciting a violation of oath by a public officer and making false statements and writings.
“What I want to do is this,” Trump said. “I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes.”
Trump, Giuliani, Eastman and Chesebro are also charged with conspiring to impersonate a public officer over the fake electors scheme.
Powell and other Trump associates are also charged with computer theft, computer trespassing, computer invasion of privacy, conspiracy to defraud the state of Georgia, and interfering with primaries and elections for “willfully and unlawfully tampering with electronic ballot markers and tabulating machines in Coffee County, Georgia,” the indictment reads, detailing their efforts to allegedly breach the state’s voting machines.
In total, the indictment includes 41 charges against the alleged criminal enterprise.
A statement from the Trump campaign posted after the indictment was unsealed attacked the district attorney’s record and called the charges “bogus.” Trump did not immediately issue a statement in his name on Monday night.
Earlier this month, Trump was indicted on federal charges over his campaign to overturn the 2020 election results, including in Georgia. That case, brought by special counsel Jack Smith, alleges Trump conspired to obstruct an official proceeding, defraud the United States and disenfranchise voters.
Trump is also charged in New York State with allegedly falsifying business records to cover up an extramarital affair ahead of the 2016 presidential election, and in Florida on federal charges over his alleged retention and concealment of highly classified documents.
Trump, 77, is currently the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.
This story was originally published August 14, 2023 at 9:59 PM with the headline "Trump indicted in fourth case, over attempts to overturn 2020 election loss in Georgia."
