The legal fallout from Donald Trump’s indictment continues, as an Atlanta-based grand jury indicted the former president and 18 others on state charges related to an attempt to overthrow the 2020 election results. Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has become a household name as she pushes the charges forward, which include “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organization” (RICO) charges. “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 says. Celebrities like rappers “Gunna” and “Young Thug” have gotten similar charges by the same Fulton County office earlier this summer.
Mr. Trump has denied all wrongdoing, as have his eighteen allies, who include former New York mayor Rudy Guiliani, former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows, and 2020 election lawyer John Eastman. The timeline, per Willis, included arrest warrants served and a future trial roughly in the next six months. She intends to try the ex-president and the eighteen co defendants together, though the logistics will be determined. Georgia, a prominent swing state in the 2020 election, is set to have its Republican primary on March 12, one week after “Super Tuesday.”
According to CNN and NBC, President Biden won the state in 2020 with a 0.2% edge. Fulton County itself, however, voted with Biden at a 70% clip, on par with the other four counties that make up the metro Atlanta area. Only thirty of the 159 counties in Georgia voted for President Biden, but these were some of the highly populated counties that make up Columbus, Savannah, and Atlanta.
Georgia will be hotly contested not only in the general election but is also one of the centers of Republican primary visits by the leading candidates. Early Georgia polls have Donald Trump leading the pack with 57%, two points higher than his national average.
He is followed by Florida Gov. Ron Desantis, biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, and former U.N. Secretary Nikki Haley. These charges have implications beyond the previous indictments because they are state, not federal charges. This means that they are unpardonable from the office of the President, be it Mr. Trump or any other U.S. President.
The ex-president has been served with four indictments in the last five months, but they had been building for years, per White House counsel Jack Smith. Willis has been working on these charges for two years, and the timeline is similar to the indictments examining hush money, classified documents, and election interference.
