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Grand jury hands up indictment but unclear whether the charges, which were not made public, involve the former US president.
The grand jury in Georgia, United States, investigating Donald Trump’s attempts to overturn his 2020 election loss has handed up a criminal indictment, though it was unclear whether the charges involved the former president.
Officials with the Fulton County Court handed the indictment to Judge Robert McBurney on Monday, but did not make them public.
Media accounts showed images of a cover sheet saying the grand jury had returned 10 indictments but did not say who was indicted or what charges were filed.
The case, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, could add to the legal woes facing Trump, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
The grand jury heard from witnesses into the evening on Monday in the election subversion investigation into Trump, a long day of testimony punctuated by the mysterious and brief appearance on a county website of a list of criminal charges against the former president that prosecutors later disavowed.
Trump’s legal team rapidly jumped to attack the integrity of the investigation.
Fulton County court clerk Che Alexander told reporters it could take her office up to three hours to process the indictments after they were accepted by the judge.
It stems from a January 2, 2021, phone call in which Trump urged Georgia’s top election official, Brad Raffensperger, to “find” enough votes to reverse his narrow loss in the state.
Raffensperger declined to do so.
Four days later, on January 6, 2021, and two weeks before Trump was due to leave office, his supporters stormed the US Capitol in an unsuccessful attempt to prevent legislators from certifying Joe Biden’s victory.
Willis also investigated an alleged scheme by the Trump campaign to subvert the US electoral process by submitting false slates of electors, people who make up the Electoral College that elects the president and vice president.
Trump has denied any wrongdoing and accuses Willis, an elected Democrat, of being politically motivated.
Al Jazeera’s John Hendren, reporting from Atlanta, Georgia, said the indictment handed to the judge from the grand jury includes 10 separate indictments, but it is not known who they relate to.
“It is expected Donald Trump’s name will be on that list and there were as many as 20 other people who were told that they were targets of this investigation. So there are a lot of people who could be charged,” Hendren said.
“So we’re still awaiting whether the former president does indeed face a fourth indictment or whether other people are on those charges as well,” he said.
Trump, 77, has been criminally indicted three times so far this year, including once by US Special Counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat.
He has long dismissed the many investigations, including two impeachments, he has faced in his years in politics as a politically motivated “witch hunt”.
Sumber: www.aljazeera.com
