The most astonishing aspect of former President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment is not the scale of an alleged multi-layered conspiracy to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020 from their rightful winner.
The most astonishing aspect of former President Donald Trump’s fourth criminal indictment is not the scale of an alleged multi-layered conspiracy to steal Georgia’s electoral votes in 2020 from their rightful winner.
It is that Trump – the accused kingpin of the scheme to overturn Joe Biden’s victory, who was charged on Monday along with 18 others – could in 17 months be raising his right hand as the 47th president and swearing to preserve, protect and defend the Constitution he was accused of plotting to shred.
The grave political crisis created by Trump’s aberrant presidency and subsequent efforts to hold him to account deepened significantly just before midnight with the unsealing of yet another indictment against him – this one from a grand jury in the critical swing state of Georgia. The charges in this state case – which bring to 91 the total number of criminal charges he’s facing across four separate cases – intensified an already epochal collision between Trump’s now extreme legal quagmire and the 2024 election in which he is the front-runner for the Republican nomination.
The 98-page indictment includes 41 counts that chart in stunning detail an alleged conspiracy to pressure local officials, make false statements about electoral fraud to state legislatures, harrass election workers, and solicit Justice Department officials and then-Vice President Mike Pence. It also alleges an attempt to unlawfully breach election equipment in Georgia and elsewhere and includes a list of actions by Trump and associates it says were all attempts to advance the conspiracy.
“Trump and the other defendants charged in this Indictment refused to accept that Trump lost, and they knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in favor of Trump,” the indictment said.
It is surreal. But Trump has now made indictments of a former president – which were unprecedented just months ago – seem routine. In addition to the Georgia case, he has been charged by special counsel Jack Smith in two separate federal cases related to the mishandling of classified documents and efforts to overturn the 2020 election. The ex-president also faces a March trial in Manhattan in a case arising from a hush money payment to an adult film actress in 2016. Trump has pleaded not guilty in these three cases and is certain to do the same in Georgia. He is likely to claim that his assault on the integrity of the Peach State’s election was merely an exercise of his right to free speech.
Far from retreating from his bid to return to power, the ex-president appears to see reclaiming the presidency – and its unique executive powers – as his best hope of forestalling the tsunami of legal cases that now confront him and any convictions that may result, before or after the election in November 2024. But the case in Georgia is highly significant since the realities of the US federal system mean that Trump, even if he recaptured the White House, would struggle to shut down a state investigation and criminal trial and could not engineer his own pardon.
A staggering set of charges
The new indictment – which requires Trump and his co-defendants, including former Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani, to surrender to Georgia authorities by noon on Friday, August 25 – compounds an already staggering array of charges now facing the former president, which do not only cloud his already controversial legacy but could eventually threaten his liberty if he were convicted.
