Trump indicted in Georgia

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Trump indicted in Georgia: Live updates

Dylan Stableford and Yahoo News StaffMon, August 14, 2023 at 9:56 PM CDT

11–14 minutes

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Former President Donald Trump has been indicted by a grand jury in Georgia on criminal charges stemming from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s long-running investigation into their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state.

It’s the fourth indictment in five months for Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination. He is the first former president ever to be criminally charged.

Yahoo News is providing live updates, reactions and instant analysis of Trump’s potential indictment in the blog below.

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  Breaking news: Trump indicted in Georgia

  Former President Donald Trump and several associates, including Rudy Giuliani, have been indicted by a grand jury in Georgia following Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis's investigation into their attempts to subvert his loss in the 2020 election in the state.

  The grand jury returned the indictments to Judge Robert McBurney inside the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta shortly 9 p.m. local time. They were just unsealed.

  Trump is the first former president ever to be criminally charged. It's the fourth time he has been indicted in the last five months.

• K

  Will Trump get a mug shot this time?

  Fulton County, Ga., Sheriff Pat Labat said the regular booking process won’t elude former President Donald Trump if he’s indicted by a grand jury, Business Insider reported.

  That means fingerprints and a mug shot.

  “Unless someone tells me differently, we are following our normal practices,” Labat told reporters. “So it doesn’t matter your status, we have mug shots ready for you.”

  If a mug shot were to be taken, it would be a first for the former president, who has been indicted on criminal charges in three other cases.

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  Hillary Clinton on Georgia indictments: 'The system is working'

  

  Hillary Clinton at a conference in Belfast, Northern Ireland, on April 17 to mark the 25th anniversary of the Good Friday Agreement(Niall Carson/Pool via Reuters)

  Former Secretary of State and 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton made an appearance Monday on MSNBC, shortly after the latest criminal indictments stemming from the investigation of Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election were announced.

  Clinton, who Trump and his supporters taunted during the 2016 campaign with chants of “Lock her up!," offered a mixed assessment of the news that new criminal charges may soon be unveiled against her former rival.

  “I don't know that anybody should be satisfied,” Clinton said of the latest indictments. “This is a terrible moment for our country, to have a former president accused of these terribly important crimes. The only satisfaction may be that the system is working.”

• A tale of 2 trials

  It’s unlikely that the federal trials of former President Donald Trump in Washington will be televised.

  But his trial in Fulton County, Ga., could be broadcast to the public.

  “It would really afford the public to see and to evaluate evidence for themselves, and to also understand, or at least appreciate, the process involved … as opposed to having to filter everything through court sketches and reports from the courtroom,” Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor, told The Hill.

  Not everyone agrees that a televised trial would increase public understanding of the trial, however. Such a proceeding might give Trump an opportunity to distract from the substance of the case by making it into a spectacle, argued Nick Akerman, a former assistant special Watergate prosecutor, in a New York Times opinion piece.

  “To ensure greater transparency, the media can do more to, among other things, regularly rely on commentary from seasoned criminal trial lawyers who attend the trials and can provide in-depth, practical legal analysis,” Akerman wrote.

  Steven Brill, founder of Court TV, argued in favor of a televised trial: “Imagine how a quiet and methodical but sure to be riveting presentation of both sides’ arguments — subject to the rules of evidence and decorum of a federal court, not the algorithms of Facebook and Twitter — might temper the national mood when a verdict is announced.

  “At the least, it will make people more informed about what could be the single most important activity their government will conduct in their lifetimes,” Brill claimed.

  It appears likely that the American justice system will get a side-by-side comparison of how a trial is impacted by the presence of television cameras, and their absence.

• C

  Trump allies point to retracted court document as proof of wrongdoing

  The Trump campaign and some of its allies were quick to seize on the confusion over a Reuters report that indicated that the Fulton County district attorney had already filed several charges against Donald Trump before the grand jury had finished hearing evidence Monday.

  As Politico reported:

  Later on Monday afternoon, the Fulton County court clerk’s office, in a statement that Reuters and Georgia media outlets posted, said no documents had been filed that day regarding the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the case. The statement also referred to ‘a fictitious document that has been circulated online,’ but did not say whether it was the same document containing the charges.

  Trump and others pointed to the reported document as proof that the Georgia investigation — and any charges stemming from it — were politically motivated.

  “The Grand Jury testimony has not even FINISHED – but it’s clear the District Attorney has already decided how this case will end,” read an email issued by the former president’s campaign on Monday. “This is an absolute DISGRACE.”

  Trump’s attorneys Drew Findling and Jennifer Little said in a statement that the document reported by Reuters was “not a simple administrative mistake,” but rather “emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations which have plagued this case from its very inception.”

  Other Trump allies echoed the Trump team’s outrage. Right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich wrote Monday on Twitter: “The law isn’t being followed. This is state sponsored lynching.”

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  How Willis oversaw 'most sprawling' case against Trump

  

  Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis at a hearing in Atlanta on Jan. 24. (John Bazemore/AP)

  The expected indictment in Georgia may be the fourth against Donald Trump in five months, but for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, it’s been years in the making. The Associated Press explains how her probe took shape:

  Just one month after Trump's infamous January 2021 phone call to suggest Georgia's secretary of state could overturn his election loss, the Fulton County district attorney announced she was looking into possible illegal ‘attempts to influence’ the results in what has become one of America's premier political battlegrounds. As she built her case, Willis called a parade of high-profile witnesses before a special grand jury, presiding over an investigation that was so public it seemed she would become the first prosecutor in U.S. history to indict a former president.

  But while Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg and special counsel Jack Smith went earlier than Willis, legal experts say her case “could be the most sprawling.”

  “I think people are going to be surprised at the level of preparedness and the level of sophistication of the prosecution,” Clint Rucker, a former prosecutor in Fulton County, told the AP. “That office is not some small backwoods country hick organization that fumbles the ball and doesn’t know how to do its job.”

  “She’s really a tough-on-crime liberal, which is kind of a rare bird these days,” said Anthony Michael Kreis, a Georgia State University law professor. “But I think that’s her brand.”

  Read more of the AP’s analysis here.

• The scene outside the courthouse on Monday

  

  Media vehicles stage outside the Fulton County Courthouse. (Brynn Anderson/AP)

• K

  What is the Georgia RICO statute?

  

  Former President Donald Trump at the Iowa State Fair on Saturday. (AP Photo/Charlie Neibergall)

  If Donald Trump is indicted, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is reportedly expected to use something called Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, law to charge the former president and his allies for allegedly participating in a scheme to overturn Georgia's 2020 election results in the state.

  RICO makes it a crime to participate in, acquire or maintain control of an “enterprise” through a “pattern of racketeering activity” or to conspire to do so. An alleged scheme doesn't have to have been completed in order for a RICO charge to apply.

  The Georgia law, while modeled after the federal statute enacted in 1970, is actually broader than the federal law.

  "The federal statute was really devised with organized crime primarily in mind, and since the 1970s has been very, very effectively used to go after organized crime," Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Yahoo News. "Recognize that when crime is committed by a corrupt organization, that's more dangerous than even a conspiracy of several people acting together."

  If Trump is charged under the RICO law and found guilty, he could face a minimum of five years in prison, with a maximum of 20 years.

  "The person at the top of the organization generally is very careful to have layers of shield between him and the people who actually carry out the crimes. The godfather keeps his hands clean, and that could be a pretty good description of Donald Trump," Cunningham told Yahoo News.

• C

  Trump campaign responds

  Donald Trump’s presidential campaign released a lengthy statement Monday night blasting Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis as a “rabid partisan” seeking to damage the former president’s political prospects.

  The statement lumped Willis’s investigation together with a New York hush money case and special counsel Jack Smith’s federal cases against Trump. Smith has accused him of mishandling sensitive government documents at Mar-a-Lago and various crimes connected to his efforts to overturn the 2020 election.

  “Ripping a page from Crooked Joe Biden’s playbook, Willis has strategically stalled her investigation to try and maximally interfere with the 2024 presidential race and damage the dominant Trump campaign. All of these corrupt Democrat attempts will fail,” Trump’s campaign said.

  The campaign statement was released as the public awaits details of who was charged in Willis’s indictment, and with what crimes.

• D

  'Fictitious' document release precedes filing of new indictments in Georgia

  

  The Fulton County Courthouse in shadow on Monday. (Joe Raedle/Getty Images)

  Hours before a grand jury that was convened in Fulton County, Ga., voted to approve 10 new criminal indictments stemming from an investigation into Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election in the state, a two-page court document that was mysteriously posted online appeared to scoop the news that more charges were forthcoming.

  Citing the document, Reuters ran with the story, only to later clarify that the source appeared to document "potential Trump charges."

  The Fulton County clerk’s office issued a statement calling the document “fictitious,” but offered no explanation as to how it might have appeared online. “While there have been no documents filed today regarding such, all members of the media should be reminded that documents that do not bear an official case number, filing date, and the name of The Clerk of Courts, in concert, are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such,” the Fulton County Clerk of Superior and Magistrate Courts said in a statement.

  Trump’s lawyers reacted angrily to the release of the document, saying the district attorney’s office “has once again shown that they have no respect for the integrity of the grand jury process.”