Donald Trump and others — including Rudolph Giuliani, his former personal lawyer, and Mark Meadows, the former White House chief of staff — have been indicted by an Atlanta grand jury in a sweeping racketeering case focused on Trump’s efforts to reverse Georgia’s results in the 2020 election.
Nineteen defendants are named in the indictment. The 41 counts, including racketeering charges, perjury and conspiracy to commit forgery, are by far the most sweeping set of accusations Trump has faced in his four indictments.
At the heart of the indictment are charges under the state Racketeering Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, or RICO, which may allow prosecutors to knit together the myriad efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn his narrow loss in Georgia. The indictment spells out 161 separate acts that prosecutors say were taken to further the alleged criminal conspiracy.
The indictment lays out eight ways the “criminal enterprise” obstructed the election: by lying to the Georgia state legislature, by lying to state officials, by creating fake pro-Trump electors, by harassing election workers, by soliciting Justice Department officials, by soliciting Vice President Mike Pence, by breaching voting machines and by engaging in a cover-up.
Other defendants: Those charged in the indictment include Kenneth Chesebro and John Eastman, architects of the plan to use fake electors to circumvent the popular vote in a number of swing states; Jeffrey Clark, a former senior official in the Justice Department who embraced false claims about the election; and a number of Georgia Republicans.
