Former President Donald Trump’s fourth indictment is 98 pages and includes 18 co-defendants. And the RICO (Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations) charge smears Trump as though he was the leader of a gang of criminals.
The new 13 charges were delivered Monday in Georgia by a grand jury that wasted no time voting on the indictment, outlining the efforts Trump and his defendants waged to keep him in power and overturn the victorious election results for President Joe Biden.
As a whole, Trump faces a combined 91 counts across the cases, and there may be more to come. Early on, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced the plan to indict Trump, and it arrived with sweeping implications and difficulties for him.
“Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office beginning in January 2021,” Willis said.
As expected, Trump lashed back at the charges and Willis. “So, the Witch Hunt continues! 19 people [were] Indicted tonight, including the former President of the United States, me, by an out of control and very corrupt District Attorney who campaigned and raised money on, ‘I will get Trump,’” the former president wrote in a post on Truth Social early Tuesday morning. “And what about those Indictment Documents put out today, long before the Grand Jury even voted, and then quickly withdrawn? Sounds Rigged to me! Why didn’t they Indict 2.5 years ago?” he added. “Because they wanted to do it right in the middle of my political campaign. Witch Hunt!”
Among Trump’s co-conspirators named in the indictment is attorney Rudy Giuliani. Upon learning of the charges against him, the former New York City mayor said it was “an affront to American democracy and does permanent, irrevocable harm to our justice system,” he said on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter. “It’s just the next chapter in a book of lies with the purpose of framing President Donald Trump and anyone willing to take on the ruling regime.”
One of the key pieces in the charges is the phone call Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, asking him to find more than 11,000 votes to overturn the results. In the hour-long conversation with a number of people on the line, Trump insisted he had won the election and indirectly blamed Dominion Voting Systems, the company providing the election machines.
“President Donald Trump: No, we do have a way, but I don’t want to get into it because we have, we found a way in other states [unintelligible] excuse me, but we don’t need it because we’re only down 11,000 votes, so we don’t even need it. I personally think they’re corrupt as hell, but we don’t need that because all we have to do Cleta is find 11,000 plus votes. So we don’t need that. I’m not looking to shake up the whole world. We won Georgia easily. We won it by hundreds of thousands of votes. But if you go by basic, simple numbers, we won it easily, easily. So we’re not giving Dominion a pass on the record. I will tell you that. But we just don’t know, we don’t need Dominion because we have so many other votes that we don’t need to prove it any more than we already have.”
And so it goes, until the process, as in the previous indictment by Special Counsel Jack Smith, continues with a surrender, arraignment, and trial.