It has been two years and nine months since Election Day 2020 when Donald Trump lost a second term as president to Joe Biden. Now the former U.S. president is the runaway front-runner in the 2024 Republican presidential contest and as of Tuesday, faces 91 criminal counts in four indictments on state and federal levels.
The latest indictment came late Monday night. Trump was indicted for a fourth time in nearly five months in Atlanta by Fani Willis, the Fulton County district attorney.
The 98-page indictment includes 13 charges against Trump and charges against 18 other Trump allies who Willis said were part of a "criminal enterprise" seeking to undo his election loss in Georgia in 2020. Trump has until noon on Aug 25 to voluntarily surrender to authorities in Fulton County.
The Georgia case covers some of the same ground as Trump's recent indictment in Washington DC, including attempts he and his allies made to disrupt the electoral vote count at the U.S. Capitol on Jan 6, 2021.
But its list of defendants — 19 in total — stands apart from the more tightly targeted case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, which so far names only Trump as a defendant.
The Georgia indictment alleges a scale of criminal conduct extending far beyond just the ex-president. It accuses the former president, the former White House chief of staff, Trump's attorneys and the former mayor of New York as members of a "criminal organization" who were part of an "enterprise" that operated in Georgia and other states.
Willis used Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law to charge Trump and 18 associates for allegedly participating in a wide-ranging conspiracy to overturn the state's 2020 election results.
Trump and his supporters are alleging the Georgia indictment is the product of a politicized, corrupt process to hobble him as he competes for the GOP nomination to face President Joe Biden next year.
On Tuesday, Trump said in a post on his social media platform that he would hold a news conference Aug 21 and release an "irrefutable" report that would prove his claims of election fraud in Georgia.
Republican Georgia Governor Brian Kemp was quick to respond to Trump's pledge to reveal election fraud in Georgia.
"The 2020 election in Georgia was not stolen," Kemp wrote on X, formerly known as Twitter. "For nearly three years now, anyone with evidence of fraud has failed to come forward — under oath — and prove anything in a court of law. Our elections in Georgia are secure, accessible, and fair and will continue to be as long as I am governor. The future of our country is at stake in 2024 and that must be our focus.''
The Georgia indictment brings charges against some of Trump's most prominent advisers, including Rudolph Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, who served as White House chief of staff at the time of the election.
"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 said.
Although the Georgia case covers some of the same ground as a federal indictment unsealed earlier this month by Special Counsel Jack Smith, there are crucial differences between the state and federal charges.
Even if Trump were to regain the presidency, the prosecutors in Georgia wouldn't report to him, nor would he have the power to pardon himself if convicted.
The Georgia case stems from a Jan 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump urged Georgia's top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to "find" enough votes to reverse his narrow loss in the state. Raffensperger declined to do so.
The Georgia indictment differs from the other three filed against Trump because Willis used RICO, usually affiliated with prosecutions against mobster — to charge Trump and his co-defendants with violating the oath of office, conspiracy to commit forgery, filing false documents and more.
Like the federal law on which it is based, the state RICO law was originally designed to dismantle organized crime groups, but has been used to prosecute other crimes, from white-collar crimes and embezzlement to public corruption cases.
The Georgia RICO statute allows prosecutors to bundle together what may seem to be unrelated crimes committed by a host of different people if those crimes are perceived to be in support of a common objective.
"It allows a prosecutor to go after the head of an organization, loosely defined, without having to prove that that head directly engaged in a conspiracy or any acts that violated state law," Michael Mears, a law professor at John Marshall Law School in Atlanta told The New York Times. "If you are a prosecutor, it's a gold mine. If you are a defense attorney, it's a nightmare."
Each indictment brought against Trump has served to bolster support for him from his followers along with money to fight the charges. But political strategists say Trump also will have to win big with independent voters who may be tired of the legal cases.
In a July Reuters/Ipsos poll, 37 percent of independents said the criminal cases made them less likely to vote for him, compared to 8 percent who said they were more likely to do so.
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