Prosecutors have charged Donald Trump with trying to overturn his 2020 election loss in the US state of Georgia in the most damning indictment so far against the former president.
The charges, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis on Monday, add to the legal woes facing Trump, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
The former president is already facing three other cases.
“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 favor of Trump,” states the indictment issued by Willis’s office.
Willis said the defendants would be allowed to voluntarily surrender by noon on August 25.
She also said she plans to ask for a trial date within six months.
The 98-page indictment lists 19 defendants and details dozens of acts by Trump and his allies to undo his defeat in the battleground state, including hectoring Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes to keep him in power, pestering officials with bogus claims of voter fraud and attempting to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new slate of electoral college electors favourable to Trump.
It also outlines a scheme to tamper with voting machines in one Georgia county as well as steal data.
The document describes the former president of the United States, the former White House chief of staff, Trump’s lawyers 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 – language that conjures up the operations of mob bosses and gang leaders.
Other defendants named in the indictment included former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows; Trump’s lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman; and a Trump administration Justice Department official, Jeffrey Clark, who advanced his efforts to undo his election loss in Georgia.
Multiple other lawyers who devised legally dubious ideas aimed at overturning the results, including Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, were also charged.
The indictment in Georgia bookends a remarkable crush of criminal cases against Trump – four in five months, each in a different city – that would be daunting for anyone, never mind a defendant simultaneously running for president.