Former President Donald Trump was criminally indicted by a grand jury in Georgia’s Fulton County on Monday night in connection with a probe into his efforts to overturn the state’s results in the 2020 presidential election.
The 41-count indictment against Trump and 18 of his associates, including Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, then-White House chief of staff Mark Meadows and Trump adviser John Eastman, was handed to a judge in Atlanta around 9 p.m. Eastern after a daylong session by the Fulton County grand jury, and the details were revealed shortly before 11 p.m.
Trump himself faces 13 criminal counts, including racketeering, filing false documents, conspiracy to commit forgery and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.
PDF: Read the entire 98-page indictment here
“Defendant Donald John Trump lost the United States presidential election held on November 3, 2020. One of the states he lost was Georgia,” the indictment reads. “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 indictment describes the effort to overturn the 2020 election results as a multistate “criminal enterprise” that also operated in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Washington D.C., among other places.
All 19 defendants were charged at least with racketeering, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said in a news conference Monday night. Willis asked those charged to turn themselves in by noon on Friday, Aug. 25.
Willis said she will seek a trial date within the next six months, but noted that a judge will make that decision. She added that she intends to try all 19 together, and that Georgia’s mandatory-minimum sentencing requires jailtime for RICO convictions.
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Trump, who has a big lead in polls for the 2024 Republican presidential primary, has denied wrongdoing, and he repeatedly has characterized the many charges that he’s facing as politically motivated.
The Trump campaign released a statement Monday night before the charges were announced, calling them “bogus.”
“Call it election interference or election manipulation — it is a dangerous effort by the ruling class to suppress the choice of the people,” the Trump campaign said.
Willis dismissed those claims. “I make decisions in this office based on the facts and the law,” she said. “The law is completely nonpartisan.”
It’s the fourth time the former president has been indicted in recent months.
The 45th president also was indicted in March in a Manhattan case over hush-money payments, then was indicted again in June in a Miami case over classified documents. He drew another indictment on Aug. 1 in a Washington, D.C., probe into his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, including his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
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Willis indicated in late July that she would announce charging decisions by Sept. 1 in her office’s investigation into Trump’s actions following the 2020 presidential election. Orange barricades were set up in late July outside the county’s courthouse, in a sign of extra security before the expected indictment.
The Democratic prosecutor’s probe was spurred in part by a recording of a Jan. 2, 2021, phone call between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump said Raffensperger should “find 11,780 votes,” or enough to erase Joe Biden’s edge in the state.
Indictments do not disqualify Trump from mounting a White House campaign. The only requirements to run for president, as laid out in the Constitution, are being a natural-born citizen at least 35 years old and a resident of the U.S. for 14 years.
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MarketWatch’s Robert Schroeder and Mike Murphy contributed to this report.