Trump indicted for racketeering over 2020 election interference

ATLANTA, Georgia – Former US president Donald Trump was indicted on Tuesday 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 Mr 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 in 2023.

It 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.

Eighteen co-defendants were indicted in the probe.

They include 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.

“Trump and the other defendants charged in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and wilfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favour of Trump,” the indictment read.

“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.”

Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said arrest warrants had been issued for Trump and the others charged, and they had until Aug 25 to “voluntarily surrender”.

“We do want to move this case along, and so we will be asking for a proposed order that occurs a trial date within the next six months,” she told reporters.

With Trump 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.

Trump on Tuesday slammed what he called a “rigged” indictment on his Truth Social platform.

“Why didn’t they indict 2½ years ago? Because they wanted to do it right in the middle of my political campaign. Witch-hunt!”

The Trump campaign released a statement as the charges were being processed, calling Ms Willis, who is a Democrat, a “rabid partisan” who was “persecuting” the former president with “bogus indictments”.

The twice-impeached Trump was charged with violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organisations (Rico) Act, as well as six conspiracy counts over alleged efforts to commit forgery, impersonate a public official and submit false statements and documents.

He is also accused of lying in statements and filing fake documents, as well as soliciting public officials to break their oaths.

Most serious threat

Georgia, which President 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 re-election in 2024.

Even if he is returned to the Oval Office, he would have none of the powers in Georgia that presidents arguably enjoy in the federal system to self-pardon or have prosecutors drop cases.

The harsh penalties associated with Rico cases can be an incentive for co-defendants to seek cooperation deals, and the statutes are usually used to target organised crime.

Under federal law, anyone who can be connected to a criminal “enterprise” through which offences were committed can be convicted under Rico. The broader Georgia law does not even require the existence of the enterprise.

The Atlanta-area authorities launched the probe after Trump called Georgia officials weeks before he was due to leave the White House.

He pressured them to “find” the 11,780 votes that would reverse Mr Biden’s victory in the state.

Meadows, who is accused of trying to get a public official to violate his oath, was on the call.

Ms Willis 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.

Criminal intent?

Giuliani, who faces 13 felony counts, was being investigated over accusations of harassment of two Fulton County poll workers.

Other Trump allies were charged over the accessing of sensitive data from an election office in a rural county south of Atlanta, one day after the 2021 Capitol riot.

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

.

He faces 78 criminal charges from those three cases. 

The 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.

Lawmakers investigating Trump’s efforts to cling to power heard evidence in a series of congressional hearings last summer that would challenge his potential defence that he genuinely believed he had been cheated of the election.

Several former administration officials – including chairman of the Joint Chiefs Mark Milley and former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson – described how Trump privately acknowledged he had lost.

And a California-based federal judge presiding in 2022 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.

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

Trump’s team issued a statement complaining about prosecutors’ lack of “respect for the integrity of the grand jury process” after US media reported that the court’s website had posted – and then quickly deleted – a document listing charges against him.

The court later released a statement denying any papers had been filed on Monday by the grand jury and calling the filing “fictitious”. AFP, REUTERS