Following an at times confounding series of events on Monday, a grand jury in Fulton County voted to indict former President Donald Trump on more than one dozen counts for his actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election.
Just before 9:00 p.m. ET, the grand jury's decision was returned to Judge Robert McBurney and then handed off to the clerk to be docketed before being unsealed and made public shortly before 11:00 pm.
Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney receives a sealed indictment from a grand jury hearing evidence of efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. pic.twitter.com/pfGo3gUc26
— CSPAN (@cspan) August 15, 2023
In all, the grand jury handed up a 98-page indictment against Trump as well as a handful of his allies including Rudy Giuliani, Mark Meadows, Kenneth Chesebro, Sidney Powell, and Jenna Ellis on an array of charges related to their conduct in the wake of the 2020 presidential election.
For Trump specifically, the grand jury voted to indict the former president on 13 counts:
- Violation of the Georgia RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) Act
- Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
- Conspiracy to Commit Impersonating a Public Officer
- Conspiracy to Commit Forgery in the First Degree
- Conspiracy to Commit False Statements and Writings
- Conspiracy to Commit Filing False Documents
- Conspiracy to Commit Forgery in the First Degree
- Conspiracy to Commit False Statements and Writings
- Filing False Documents
- Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
- False Statements and Writings
- Solicitation of Violation of Oath by Public Officer
- False Statements and Writings
The full indictment listing Trump and 18 of his allies along with a total of 41 counts against them is embedded below:
Following the indictment, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said that arrest warrants were issued for the defendants and set a deadline of 12:00 p.m. on August 25 for them to voluntarily surrender.
As Townhall reported earlier on Monday, Reuters caught an apparently prematurely posted document listing Trump's name along with 39 counts on a variety of charges. Fulton County officials denied that the docket which was briefly posted and then deleted represented charges that were filed as the grand jury continued hearing from witnesses into the afternoon and evening, then called the docket "fictitious" without providing more context. As the final indictment which was unsealed late Monday night showed, most of the charges listed on the erroneously posted document were, in fact, the counts on which Trump was indicted.
Monday evening's indictment in Georgia follows the 45th president's previous indictments in other jurisdictions. First was the Manhattan indictment dealing with 2016 payments to Stormy Daniels, then came his initial indictment in Florida for his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House, followed by the subsequent superseding indictment in the document case, and most recently the D.C. indictment related to events surrounding January 6, 2021, followed now by the indictment in Georgia.
In addition to fighting to defend his name and actions in multiple courts and jurisdictions, Trump is continuing to fight for his return to the White House. According to the Real Clear Politics polling average, Trump leads the GOP primary field with a 39.7 point advantage.
In a statement released Monday evening even before the indictments were unsealed, Trump's campaign reacted to the latest indictment. "GA's radical Democrat District Attorney Fani Willis is a rabid partisan who is campaigning and fundraising on a platform of prosecuting President Trump through these bogus indictments," Trump's 2024 campaign said. "Ripping a page from Crooked Joe Biden’s playbook, Willis has strategically stalled her investigation to try and maximally interfere with the 2024 presidential race and damage the dominant Trump campaign. All of these corrupt Democrat attempts will fail," the statement said.
Continuing, Trump's campaign said "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" and asserted that investigators in Georgia "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." According to his campaign, "President Trump represents the greatest threat to these Democrats’ political futures (and the greatest hope for America)."
This is a developing story and may be updated.
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