Donald Trump was indicted Tuesday, August 15, on charges of racketeering and a string of election crimes after a sprawling, two-year probe into his efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat to Joe Biden in the US state of Georgia.
The case – relying on laws typically used to bring down mobsters – is the fourth targeting the 77-year-old Republican this year and could lead to a watershed moment, the first televised trial of a former president in US history.
Prosecutors in Atlanta charged the Republican leader with 13 felony counts – compounding the legal threats he is facing in multiple jurisdictions as a firestorm of investigations imperils his bid for a second White House term.
With the tycoon already due to go on trial in New York, south Florida and Washington, the latest charges herald the unprecedented scenario of the 2024 presidential election being litigated as much from the courtroom as the ballot box.
The twice-impeached Trump was charged with violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced And Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, as well as six conspiracy counts over alleged efforts to commit forgery, impersonate a public official and submit false statements and documents.
The indictment named a number of co-defendants including Trump's former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who pressured local legislators over the result after the election, and Trump's White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
Georgia, which Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes, presents perhaps the most serious threat to Trump's liberty as he leads the field comfortably for his party's nomination to bid for reelection.
Even if he is reinstated to the Oval Office, he would have none of the powers that presidents arguably enjoy in the federal system to pardon themselves or have prosecutors drop cases.
RICO statutes are usually used to target organized crime.
Under federal law, anyone who can be connected to a criminal "enterprise" through which offenses were committed can be convicted under RICO. The broader Georgia law doesn't even require the existence of the enterprise.
Atlanta-area authorities launched the probe after Trump called Georgia officials weeks before he was due to leave the White House, pressuring them to "find" the 11,780 votes that would reverse Biden's victory in the Peach State.
District Attorney Fani Willis, Fulton County's chief prosecutor, empaneled a special grand jury that heard from around 75 witnesses before recommending a raft of felony counts in a secret report in February.
She alleges that Trump's team worked with local Republicans on a scheme to replace legitimate slates of "electors" – the officials who certify a state's results and send them to the US Congress – with fake pro-Trump stand-ins.
Trump is already facing dozens of felony charges after being federally indicted over the alleged plot to subvert the election, and further prosecutions over his alleged mishandling of classified documents and keeping allegedly fraudulent business records.
Authorities in Atlanta have installed security barricades outside the downtown courthouse in anticipation of a potential influx of Trump supporters and counter-protesters in the latest case.
Republicans in Congress have largely united behind defending Trump from what they call a politically-motivated "witch hunt" by Democrats pulling the strings at the Justice Department.
It will be up to a jury, however, to decide if the prosecution has shown criminal intent by the billionaire property mogul, who denies all wrongdoing.
Lawmakers investigating Trump's efforts to cling to power heard evidence in a series of congressional hearings last summer that would challenge his potential defense that he genuinely believed he had been cheated of the election.
Several former administration officials – including Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and Cassidy Hutchinson, a former White House aide – described how Trump privately acknowledged he had lost.
And a California-based federal judge presiding last year over a dispute about evidence demanded by Congress ruled that Trump had signed legal documents describing evidence of election fraud that he knew were false.
While federal courthouses generally ban electronic recording, Georgia's courts are more transparent, meaning there is no bar to the proceedings being watched on televisions across the country, from the first preliminary hearing onwards.
During the day on Monday, inside the courthouse, cameras offered live feeds of the movements of the judge and other county officials, but no one offered clarity as to when an indictment might be released.
The grand jury heard from witnesses into the evening Monday in the election subversion investigation into Donald Trump, a long day of testimony punctuated by the mysterious and brief appearance on a county website of a list of criminal charges against the former president that prosecutors later disavowed.
Prosecutors in Fulton County presented evidence to the grand jury as they pushed toward a likely indictment, summoning multiple former state officials including the ex-lieutenant governor as witnesses.
But the process hit an unexpected snag in the middle of the day, when Reuters reported on a document listing criminal charges to be brought against Trump, including state racketeering counts, conspiracy to commit false statements and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.
Reuters, which later published a copy of the document, said the filing was taken down quickly. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said the report of charges being filed was "inaccurate," but declined to comment further on a kerfuffle that the Trump legal team rapidly jumped on to attack the integrity of the investigation.
The office of the Fulton County courts clerk later released a statement that seemed to only raise more questions, calling the posted document "fictitious," but failing to explain how it got on the court's website. The clerk's office said documents without official case numbers "are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such." But the document that appeared online did have a case number on it.
Asked about the "fictitious" document Monday evening, the court's clerk, Che Alexander, said: "I mean, I don’t know what else to say, like, grace … I don’t know, I haven’t seen an indictment, right, so I don’t have anything." On the question of whether the website had been hacked, she said, "I can't speak to that."
Trump and his allies, who have characterized the investigation as politically motivated, immediately seized on the apparent error to claim that the process was rigged. Trump’s campaign aimed to fundraise off it, sending out an email with the since-deleted document embedded.
Trump’s legal team said it was not a "simple administrative mistake." Rather it was "emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations which have plagued this case from its very inception," said lawyers Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg.
It was unclear why the list was posted while grand jurors were still hearing from witnesses in the sprawling investigation into actions taken by Trump and others in their efforts to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia to Democrat Joe Biden. It was also unclear whether grand jurors were aware that the filing was posted online. They still would need to vote on charges, so the counts listed in the posting may or may not ultimately be brought against Trump.
Legal experts said it was likely a clerical error listing charges prosecutors were planning to ask the grand jury to vote on. Prosecutors draft indictments and present them to the grand jury, which ultimately decides whether to hand charges down.
"I think this tells us what they are planning to present to the grand jury, and the grand jury could say no," said Clark Cunningham, a Georgia State University law professor. He said while the error will give Trump's legal team fodder to complain, "it will not scuttle the case."
"Will his lawyers make a lot of noise about it? Yes, they will. Will Mr. Trump make a lot of noise about it? Yes, he will. I’m sure there will have to be an explanation for it," Cunningham said.
One person who said he’d been called to testify to the grand jury suggested on Monday that the process may be moving more quickly than anticipated. George Chidi, an independent journalist, had tweeted previously that he was asked to testify on Tuesday, but later posted he was going to court on Monday, adding: "They’re moving faster than they thought."
Chidi wrote in The Intercept last month that he barged "into a semi-clandestine meeting of Republicans pretending to be Georgia’s official electors in December 2020." He described being thrown out of the room just after entering, told that it was an "education meeting."
Former lieutenant governor Geoff Duncan, who over the weekend said he'd also been asked to testify Tuesday, instead appeared before the grand jury Monday. He told reporters outside the courthouse that the 2020 election had been "fair and legal" and said now was the "opportunity to get the real story out."
The document listing criminal charges filed midday Monday listed more than a dozen felony counts, including Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO. Willis has long been expected to levy that charge against Trump and his associates, accusing them of participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state’s 2020 election results.
Two counts – including solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer – listed the date of offense as Jan. 2, 2021, which was when Trump during a phone call with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger said he wanted to "find" enough votes to overturn his loss in the state. Other counts list the date of offense as Sept. 17, 2021, which is the same day Trump sent Raffensperger a message urging him to investigate "large-scale voter fraud," decertify the election and "announce the true winner" if the investigation found the fraud.
Former Democratic state Sen. Jen Jordan, who had been subpoenaed to testify before the grand jury, said as she left the Fulton County courthouse late Monday morning that she had been questioned for about 40 minutes. Former Democratic state Rep. Bee Nguyen also confirmed that she testified. News outlets reported that Gabriel Sterling, a top official in the secretary of state’s office, was seen arriving at the courthouse earlier Monday.
"No individual is above the law, and I will continue to fully cooperate with any legal proceedings seeking the truth and protecting our democracy," Nguyen said in a statement.
Nguyen and Jordan both attended legislative hearings in December 2020 during which former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and others made false claims of widespread election fraud in Georgia. Trump lawyer John Eastman also appeared during at least one of those hearings and said the election had not been held in compliance with Georgia law and that lawmakers should appoint a new slate of electors.
Sterling and his boss, Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger – both Republicans – forcefully pushed back against allegations of widespread problems with Georgia's election.
Trump famously called Raffensperger on Jan. 2, 2021, and suggested the state's top elections official could help "find" the votes Trump needed to beat Biden. It was the release of a recording of that phone call that prompted Willis to open her investigation about a month later.