And four. Donald Trump was charged for the fourth time on Monday August 14. This time, it was a grand jury from Georgia, in Fulton County, Atlanta, which indicted the former president for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in this rocking state.
Everything accelerated on Monday August 14th. After two and a half years of investigation, prosecutor Fani Willis began her presentation of the case in the morning, before a grand jury of twenty-three people who had to vote on the indictment of the former president by a simple majority. With the hearing of witnesses, under the presidency of judge Robert McBurney, the maneuver was accelerated to close the case in the evening, well after the theoretical closing time of the court at 5 p.m.
In the end, Donald Trump was charged with thirteen counts at the start of the evening, along with eighteen other people, including his adviser, former New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, his former chief of staff, Mark Meadows , and a Justice Department official under his administration, Jeffrey Clark. In total, forty-one different counts are cited against the nineteen defendants, including “false declarations and false documents, usurpation of public office, forgery and use of forgery”pressure on witnesses, a series of computer crimes or even perjury.
“This plot contained a plan”
“Defendant Donald Trump lost the US presidential election of November 3, 2020says the 98-page indictment. One of the states he lost was Georgia. Trump and the other defendants in this indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined in a conspiracy to illegally alter the outcome of the election in Trump’s favor. This conspiracy contained a common plan and purpose to commit two or more acts of extortion in Fulton County, Georgia, elsewhere in the State of Georgia, and in other states. »
Mr. Trump is notably charged under Georgia’s extortion and criminal association law, which generally applies to organized crime. The maximum penalty is twenty years in prison. These charges also carry a minimum sentence of five years, unlike the other trials where Mr. Trump is summoned.
The main grievance concerns the attempt to overturn the votes. Donald Trump lost Georgia by about 12,000 out of 5 million votes cast in 2020. Trump and his supporters claimed in the aftermath of the poll that fraud had been committed, but recounts and an audit by the Secretary of State of Georgia, a Republican, Brad Raffensperger, had provided no evidence of widespread fraud.
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