Donald Trump Indicted in Georgia Over Effort to Overturn Election Results

ATLANTA—A local prosecutor in Atlanta has brought criminal charges against Donald Trump for trying to undo his 2020 election defeat in Georgia, marking the fourth time the former president has been indicted this year and deepening his legal woes ahead of the 2024 election.

A grand jury in Atlanta returned an indictment of Trump after hearing evidence presented by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis over the course of a more than two-year investigation.

The move by Willis, a Democrat, had been widely anticipated. In April, she said she planned to announce charging decisions this summer, and she had told local law-enforcement leaders to prepare for the “significant public reaction” her announcement could trigger.

Willis initially opened the probe on the basis of a recorded Jan. 2, 2021, phone call in which then-President Trump urged Republican Brad Raffensperger, the state’s top elections official, to find enough votes to overturn the election. Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination, denies wrongdoing and has said the call was perfect. Trump has denounced the Fulton County probe as a witch hunt.

Willis convened a special grand jury, which heard from more than 75 witnesses, wrote a report summarizing its findings and recommended criminal charges against several people whose identities haven’t been made public. The special grand jury lacked the authority to issue indictments, however, prompting Willis to present evidence to a regular grand jury.

In November 2020, Trump lost the election in Georgia to Joe Biden by roughly 12,000 votes out of five million cast. Trump and his supporters claimed the election was stolen, but statewide recounts and a partial forensic audit overseen by state election officials found no evidence of widespread fraud. Court challenges failed.

Earlier this year, Trump was indicted by Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg for his role in paying hush money to a porn star on the eve of the 2016 election, marking the first time a former president has faced criminal charges.

Then, in June, federal prosecutors unsealed a sweeping indictment alleging the former president held on to classified documents he knew he shouldn’t have retained access to, shared them with others and directed his staff to help him evade authorities’ efforts to get them back. The case is being handled in Florida.

A superseding federal indictment returned in late July charged Trump with an additional count of willful retention of national-defense information, stemming from a classified national-security document prosecutors said he showed to visitors at his golf club in New Jersey.

Trump was indicted a third time Aug. 1 in a further criminal case accusing him of trying to subvert the will of American voters through his attempts to cling to power after he lost the 2020 election. That indictment, by a federal grand jury in Washington, charges Trump with four crimes, including conspiring to defraud the U.S., obstructing an official proceeding, and conspiring against the rights of voters for his actions that culminated in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol. 

Trump pleaded not guilty in the New York, Florida and Washington, D.C., cases.

Write to Cameron McWhirter at [email protected] and Jan Wolfe at [email protected]