Trump and his closest allies, including his former attorney Rudy Giuliani, former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, and a senior former Justice Department official named Jeffrey Clark, were indicted yesterday on felony charges related to efforts to rig the Georgia 2020 presidential election.
The broad 41-count indictment also names several other attorneys in addition to John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Jenna Ellis, and Ray Smith. Allegations of RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) law violations were made against each individual.
Trump was charged with felony racketeering and several conspiracy crimes in an indictment that was presented to the judge at 9 p.m. ET and made public just before 11 p.m., according to court documents.
A conviction for conspiracy can result in a minimum penalty of one year in jail and a variable maximum sentence, whereas a conviction for racketeering carries a sentence of five to twenty years.
“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 says.
Like Giuliani did hours before the indictment was made public, Trump has denied all wrongdoing. Requests for comment from Eastman, Meadows, Chesebro, Ellis, and Smith all went unanswered right away.
At a late-night news conference, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said that all of the defendants have arrest warrants out for them and have until August 25 to turn themselves in willingly.
Willis stated that all 19 accused would be tried concurrently.
The indictment was returned earlier Monday night after a grand jury hearing testimony in Willis’ inquiry into whether Trump and his aides meddled in the 2020 presidential race.
Trump has been charged with attempting to sway the outcome of the election twice in the last two weeks, making this his fourth indictment in the past 412 months.
Willis oversaw a thorough, two-year investigation into the possibility that Trump and his friends “coordinated attempts to unlawfully alter the outcome of the 2020 elections.”
Trump’s Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia’s senior election official, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, pleading with him to “find” the votes required for Trump to defeat Joe Biden and win the state was one among the episodes mentioned in the latest indictment.
The phone call, according to Trump, was “perfect.”
The indictment also focuses on the so-called fake electors, or those who falsely signed a certificate claiming to be Georgia’s legitimate electors and that Trump won the state in the year 2020. In the last two months, Willis’ office reached immunity agreements with a number of the fictitious electors, according to court documents. Prosecutors claim that there are at least 19 unindicted co-conspirators, including 13 who are believed to have taken part in the phony elector conspiracy, through the indictment.
The indictment ignited a fury among Republican lawmakers, who said Trump’s due process rights had been violated. “Here we go again: another disastrous Trump indictment. It’s downright pathetic that Fulton County publicly posted the indictment on its website even before the grand jury had finished convening,” wrote presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy in an X post.
“Since the four prosecutions against Trump are using novel & untested legal theories, it’s fair game for him to do the same in defense: immediately file a motion to dismiss for a constitutional due process violation for publicly issuing an indictment before the grand jury had actually signed one,” he continued.
The grand jury procedure has also come under scrutiny as a result of extensive media coverage of the proceedings’ apparent hurriedness. Prosecutors wanted the case resolved by Tuesday morning, so jurors were urged to remain silent far into the night.
“Fulton County DA appears determined to finish presenting evidence in the Trump case to the grand jury tonight, per multiple people familiar — meaning indictments could also come tonight,” wrote MSNBC reporter Hugo Lowell. “Inside the courthouse, people are currently having dinner.”
In addition to the two federal charges brought against him and the criminal complaints brought by the Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and now Willis, the former president already faces a sentence of more than 600 years in jail.
