Donald Trump indicted over alleged 2020 election fraud in Georgia

Donald Trump said the new charges accusing him of attempting to overturn the election results “sound rigged” after the indictment was accidentally published before a decision was formally made.

Documents appeared on the Fulton County court’s website on Monday – when the Grand Jury was due to be debating charges – before it was quickly removed.

Mr Trump was formally charged hours later.

“What about those indictment documents put out today, long before the grand jury even voted, and then quickly withdrawn? Sounds rigged to me!” Mr Trump said on Tuesday morning.

The former president has been charged with 13 counts in connection with his alleged attempt to overturn the presidential election result in Georgia in 2020.

He is accused of racketeering using a complicated ‘mob boss’ law, and violating his oath of office, among other crimes.

The charges mean Mr Trump faces a fourth criminal trial as he prepares to run for election again in next year’s presidential race.

The 98-page filing revealed Mr Trump had been charged alongside 18 others including Rudy Guiliani, his former attorney, and several other allies including John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Jenna Ellis and Jeffrey Clark.

The indictment accuses Mr Trump of leading a criminal enterprise to stay in office, in 41 total counts across the 19 defendants.

It also references other unidentified alleged co-conspirators, who have not been indicted.

In a statement following the indictment, Fani Willis, the Fulton County District Attorney, said: “The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.”

Ms Willis added that the grand jury had issued arrest warrants for the 19 defendants and those charged have until noon on Friday, August 25 to surrender. She intends to try all 19 defendants together and would seek a trial date in the next six months.

Asked about Mr Trump’s allegation that her investigation is politically motivated, Ms Willis said: “I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law. The law is completely nonpartisan. That’s how decisions are made in every case.”

In a statement, a spokesman for Mr Trump repeated his claim that the timing of the indictment was politically motivated.

“Combined with the intentionally slow-walked investigations by the Biden-Smith goon squads and the false charges in New York, the timing of this latest coordinated strike by a biased prosecutor in an overwhelmingly Democrat jurisdiction not only betrays the trust of the American people, but also exposes true motivation driving their fabricated accusations,” the spokesman said.

“They could have brought this two and half years ago, yet they chose to do this for election interference reasons in the middle of President Trump’s successful campaign.”

Mr Trump has already been charged in New York, in the so-called “hush money” case, in Washington DC over his actions after the 2020 election in connection with the January 6 Capitol riots, and in Florida over allegations he mishandled confidential documents.

He has always denied he acted improperly in Georgia in the aftermath of the election, as he sought to overturn the result in the state after narrowly losing the vote to Joe Biden.

The indictment could lead to the first televised trial of a former president, a watershed moment in US history. It is also notable in using “Rico” racketeering charges typically used to prosecute gang bosses.

Mr Trump has posted a number of messages to his Truth Social platform calling the matter “ridiculous” and urging a local election official whom he identified by name and called a “loser” not to testify to the grand jury.

“THOSE WHO RIGGED & STOLE THE ELECTION WERE THE ONES DOING THE TAMPERING, & THEY ARE THE SLIME THAT SHOULD BE PROSECUTED,” he said.

Some of the charges are linked to the now-infamous phone call Mr Trump placed to Georgia officials asking them to “find” exactly the number of votes he would have needed to overturn his defeat to Mr Biden.

The call, between Mr Trump and Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, was reported the day after it took place and featured the former president telling Mr Raffensperger falsely that he could have committed a crime by refusing to overturn the election results.

It is further alleged that Mr Trump attempted to overturn the vote by providing a false certification of his victory in Georgia to Congress following the election, and that he lied about alleged election fraud conducted by his aides.

The indictment said: “Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020.

“One of the states he lost was Georgia. 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.

“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.”

The prosecutions were brought by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney based in Atlanta, and were agreed by a grand jury in the state.

The use of Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (Rico) law is considered unusual for political cases, as it has previously been used to bring down mobsters.

It makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so.

The alleged scheme does not have to have been successful for a Rico charge to be effective.

Although racketeering statutes are usually used to target organised crime, the broader law allows prosecutors to string together offences committed by different people toward one common goal, criminal or not.

Ms Willis, like other prosecutors tasked with investigating Mr Trump, has been subject to criticism from the former president and his supporters online.

The former president said Ms Willis, who is black and aged 52, was “a young woman, a young racist in Atlanta”.

She has long declined to comment on Mr Trump’s insults, but has emailed her staff to warn that one of his attack ads included “derogatory and false information” about her and instructed them not to react publicly.

Georgia’s court system is more transparent than the federal system, meaning there is no bar to the case being televised from the first preliminary hearing onwards.

It would be the first time a former president has appeared as a defendant in a televised trial in US history.

Despite his legal woes in several states, Mr Trump remains the frontrunner in the Republican primary race by a significant margin.

He has the support of around 52 per cent of Republican voters, while his next closest rival Ron DeSantis trails at around 14 per cent.