“The defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result,” Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said at a press conference.
Former president Donald Trump and 18 others have been indicted in connection to trying to "find" votes in Georgia after losing the 2020 presidential election. This is the former president’s fourth indictment.
The grand jury in Atlanta handed the indictment to a judge Monday night. Before midnight, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis made it official.
“The defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result,” Willis said at a press conference.
Among the 18 co-defendants are loyal lieutenants who led the charge in 2020 to keep Trump in power, including Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell and Jenna Ellis.
Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows is being indicted for the first time, along with Trump’s attorney John Eastman and former Assistant Attorney General Jeffrey Clark. All were charged with conspiring to overturn Georgia’s election results.
Trevian Kutti, a publicist for Kanye West, is also among those charged.
The indictment alleges Kutti went to the home of election worker Ruby Freeman and pressured her to falsely admit she worked to rig the election.
Freeman and her daughter Shaye Moss testified before the Jan. 6 committee that their lives were turned upside down by conspiracy theories, including a claim by Giuliani that Freeman and Moss were “passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin.”
Moss says her mother had handed her a ginger mint.
Before the indictment came down, Trump took to social media to lash out at the Fulton County district attorney, calling her “phoney (sic) Fani Willis."
Trump and his co-defendants have 10 days to turn themselves in. If they fail to do so, the Fulton County district attorney vowed she will issue arrest warrants.
Trump’s attorney appeared on Fox News saying Trump plans to surrender himself.
“They’re gonna force him to have a mugshot. The purpose of a mugshot is when you don’t recognize someone, you think there’s a flight risk. This man is the most famous person in the world,” his attorney said.
The DA plans to try Trump and all of his co-defendants together.
