Former President Donald Trump is facing yet another indictment, this time in Georgia where District Attorney Fani Willis is arguing that he and 18 others unlawfully attempted to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.
In announcing the charges late Monday, Willis said: “The indictment alleges that rather than abide by Georgia’s legal process for election challenges, the defendants engaged in a criminal racketeering enterprise to overturn Georgia’s presidential election result.”
Trump is facing 13 of the indictment’s 41 counts and, as with the federal indictment brought by Special Counsel Jack Smith earlier this month, many critics claimed this is an attempt to criminalize political speech.
Three attorneys representing the former president issued a statement shortly after the indictment was announced, in part accusing Willis’ office of a “shocking and absurd” process that began “with the leak of a presumed and premature indictment before the witnesses had testified or the grand jurors had deliberated.”
The defense team, which includes Drew Findling, Jennifer Little, and Marissa Goldberg, went on to accuse the district attorney of “being unable to offer any explanation” for the leak.
“In light of this major fumble, the Fulton County District Attorney’s Office clearly decided to force through and rush this 98-page indictment,” they wrote. “This one-sided grand jury presentation relied on witnesses who harbor their own personal and political interests — some of whom ran campaigns touting their efforts against the accused and/or profited from book deals and employment opportunities as a result.”
The critical tone continued into the statement’s predictions about the validity of the charges themselves.
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” the trio of attorneys concluded.
The Trump campaign issued its own statement denouncing the charges.
A number of legal experts also weighed in, including Harvard University professor Alan Dershowitz, who compared Trump’s actions in 2020 to the challenges he helped launch on behalf of Democratic nominee Al Gore 20 years earlier.
“We challenged the election, and we did much of the things that are being done today and people praised us,” he said. “I wrote a bestselling book called ‘Supreme Injustice. Now they’re making it a crime.”
