A grand jury in Georgia returned ten indictments on Monday in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s investigation into former President Donald Trump.
Update: The 98-page indictment revealed that Trump and 18 other co-defendants were indicted.
Among those indicted include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, former Georgia Republican Party Chairman David Shafer, and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani (R).
As the Atlanta Journal-Constitution detailed:
Also indicted Tuesday were Trump co-defendants: state Sen. Shawn Still; attorneys John Eastman, Sidney Powell, Jenna Ellis, Bob Cheeley, Ray Smith III and Kenneth Chesebro; former assistant U.S. attorney general Jeffrey Clark; GOP strategist Michael Roman; former Coffee County elections supervisor Misty Hampton; former Coffee County GOP chairwoman Cathy Latham; Atlanta bail bondsman Scott Hall; publicist Trevian Kutti; Illinois pastor Stephen Cliffguard Lee; and Harrison Floyd, who briefly ran for a suburban Atlanta U.S. House seat before serving as director of Black Voices for Trump.
The grand jury met for approximately ten hours and heard testimony, then voted on the potential charges on Monday. Fulton County Superior Court Judge Robert McBurney signed off on the charges around 9:00 p.m. local time Monday night.
The grand jury was expected to convene through Tuesday but pushed through its agenda quicker than expected, as the New York Post noted. It is still unclear what charges were brought against the former president and who else is possibly named in the indictments.
The clerk announced that in the “worst case scenario,” the indictments would be unsealed and made public in three hours. Wills’s office announced it would hold a press conference after the indictments are processed by the clerk’s office.
Willis has been investigating Trump’s alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia for close to three years. News broke over the weekend that she planned to bring multiple witnesses before the grand jury this week.
The Trump campaign blasted Willis as a “rabid partisan who is campaigning and fundraising on a platform of prosecuting President Trump through these bogus indictments” in a statement shortly after the grand jury returned the indictments.
“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,” the statement said.
The Trump campaign called out the “intentionally slow-walked investigations by the Biden-Smith goon squads” and argued the indictments are being brought so close to the 2024 election for “election interference reasons.”
The statement continued:
The legal double-standard set against President Trump must end. Under the Crooked Biden Cartel, there are no rules for Democrats, while Republicans face criminal charges for exercising their First Amendment rights.
These activities by Democrat leaders constitute a grave threat to American democracy and are direct attempts to deprive the American people of their rightful choice to cast their vote for President. Call it election interference or election manipulation—it is a dangerous effort by the ruling class to suppress the choice of the people. It is un-American and wrong.
They are taking away President Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech, and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that the Democrats do all the time. The ones who should be prosecuted are the ones who created the corruption.
The official court website of Fulton County, Georgia, published what appeared to be an indictment against Trump several hours before the grand jury returned the ten indictments.
Judge McBurney was seen cracking jokes with journalists in the courtroom after signing off on the indictments.
The judge in Georgia is cracking jokes to the journalists in the room after signing off on the indictments against President Trump pic.twitter.com/zmjHaghake
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 15, 2023
The Georgia indictment would be Trump’s fourth indictment in the past five months. Trump is facing two federal charges from Special Counsel Jack Smith based on his alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 election results and his handling of White House documents. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg also brought over 30 counts of falsifying business records against Trump.
Jordan Dixon-Hamilton is a reporter for Breitbart News. Write to him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter.
