…It’s the fourth indictment in five months for former President Donald Trump.
Former President Donald Trump and 18 others have been indicted by a grand jury in Georgia on criminal charges stemming from Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’s long-running investigation into their attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state.
Speaking before midnight ET on Monday after the indictment was unsealed, Willis said the defendants have until noon on Friday, Aug. 25, to surrender.
Trump has been charged with 13 counts — including a charge of violating Georgia’s RICO Act, or Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations.
It’s the fourth indictment in five months for Trump, the frontrunner for the 2024 Republican nomination.
Source: Dylan Stableford and Yahoo News Staff
Can Trump make the Georgia case disappear if he’s elected?
Unlike the two federal indictments brought against Donald Trump by the Justice Department, the criminal charges filed Monday night by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis are part of a state prosecution, which is not subject to the authority of the federal government. The same applies to the Manhattan case in New York.
“Fani Willis is an elected district attorney. The president can’t do anything about her,” Clark Cunningham, a law professor at Georgia State University, told Yahoo News. Cunningham noted that the minimum penalty for a conviction under the Georgia Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations, or RICO, Act is five years. Trump and the other co-defendants in the Georgia case have all been charged with violating the state’s RICO Act, in addition to an array of other counts.
“If Trump is re-elected … we could have a sitting president facing a criminal trial in the state of Georgia while president,” Cunningham said.
In the event that Trump is re-elected, he could ostensibly pardon himself in the two federal criminal cases he’s currently facing, one of which also stems from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results. The other is related to his handling of classified documents after leaving the White House.
While Cunningham said a president’s ability to self-pardon is untested, a Trump-appointed Justice Department would be unlikely to challenge it if he tried. But, Cunningham said, Trump may not even need to win in order to get off the hook — at least in the federal cases.
“Even if Trump is not the Republican nominee, whoever the Republican nominee is going to have an enormous incentive to promise voters that they will dismiss the prosecution and pardon Trump, because that way he mobilizes the Trump voters to get out and vote for any general election,” Cunningham said. “So even if you have Tim Scott as the next president, I think the chances are that the federal cases go away.”
