ATLANTA — Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis held a news conference Monday night after a long day at the Fulton County Courthouse concluded with a grand jury delivering indictments in the investigation of Former President Donald Trump and his allies' efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in Georgia.
Will announced that those indicted have all been given until Aug. 25 to surrender. It’s the fourth criminal case brought against the former president as he seeks to reclaim the White House.
Re-Watch the DA's announcement below.
How the Georgia Trump investigation arrived here
It's been nearly three years - a long and winding road that started with the initial period after the 2020 election, which saw Joe Biden win Georgia and the Trump campaign then orchestrate a legal and political campaign to have the former president's loss reversed.
Several lawsuits were filed, all of them failing to clear basic legal hurdles. Trump and his political allies asserted a conspiracy to manipulate the election in Georgia that the state's Republican officials repeatedly refuted. On Dec. 14, 2020, 16 Republican "alternate" electors met at the Georgia Capitol to submit signed Electoral College documents that falsely claimed Trump won the 2020 election.
And a pressure campaign launched against state officials culminated most notoriously with a phone call to Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger in which Trump asked him to "find" enough votes to flip the result. The call, on Jan. 2, 2021, came four days before a mob sacked the U.S. Capitol in an effort to stop the transfer of power.
Roughly a year later, in January 2022, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis announced she had requested a special purpose grand jury to investigate the events that followed the 2020 election.
The panel began its work in May 2022. Over the course of roughly eight months, the jury interviewed 75 witnesses. It completed its work Jan. 9 earlier this year.
From the start, Willis said she was interested in the phone call between Trump and Raffensperger. It also become clear that she was interested in several other areas, including:
the illegitimate slate of "alternate" electors and their submission of Electoral College votes on behalf of Trump
false statements about the election made by former New York mayor and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani and others to state lawmakers
efforts to pressure Fulton County elections workers to admit wrongdoing
breaches of election equipment in rural Coffee County
the abrupt departure of U.S. Attorney BJay Pak in Atlanta in January 2021
The special purpose grand jury issued a report upon completing its work, the large majority of which has remained sealed by courts. Jury foreperson Emily Kohrs nonetheless told media outlets earlier this year that the report recommended indictments for more than a dozen people.
At varying points DA Willis informed Giuliani and the "alternate" electors they may be targets of the investigation, though at least half of the "electors" have taken deals, according to court documents.
On July 11, two new Fulton County grand juries were sworn in, with one of them to hear the Trump case according to previous timelines laid out by Willis.
She declined to lay out an exact timeline, but promised, "The American people will have the answer they want by Sept. 1."
She held that promise - as the grand jury delivered indictments after a marathon day in court on August 14.