Ex-President Donald Trump is expected to be in court between October and June next year, giving him the time he needs to campaign for his 2024 White House nomination.
Trump was arrested Thursday for the fourth time this year by authorities at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta — and subsequently shared his historic mugshot on X, formerly known as Twitter.
But he shows no signs of his criminal proceedings quashing his efforts after turbo-charging the polls by using the charges to his advantage.
Trump is currently ahead, with 52 percent of all Republican primary voters voting for him over DeStantis, who is in second place with just under 15 percent.
The 37-point lead appears to suggest Trump’s rivals are unable to capitalize on the 77-year-old’s mounting legal woes.
Donald Trump made history by becoming the first former president to pose for a mug shot
Prosecutors allege Trump conspired to “corruptly obstruct and impede” confirmation of the Jan. 6 electoral vote by telling his supporters to “fight like hell” and directing them to make their way to the to make the Capitol
Trump faces a total of 91 felonies from four criminal investigations, each of which resulted in indictments
Stacks of boxes are seen in the White and Gold Ballroom of former US President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach
Supporters of Donald Trump, Georgina and Cliff MacMorris, hold flags outside the Fulton County Jail ahead of Trump’s August 24 surrender
The Fulton County Jail has released Donald Trump’s accounting file detailing the charges and his key details
Regardless, Trump’s schedule will be tight as he focuses on campaigning against Biden’s Justice Department.
If convicted on all counts, he faces 71 years in prison — and unlike federal charges, state charges cannot be pardoned by a president.
The investigation by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis began shortly after the release of a Jan. 2, 2021 recording of a phone conversation between Trump and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the then-President indicated that Raffensperger could “find 11,780 votes.” – just enough to overtake Joe Biden.
Trump has described his phone call with Raffensperger as “perfect” and portrayed the prosecution by the Democratic District Attorney as politically motivated.
Here’s a look at some of the other top investigations into Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination.
ELECTION INTERFERENCE CASE IN GEORGIA – within the next six months
Trump and 18 allies were indicted in Georgia on Aug. 14 over their efforts to reverse his 2020 election loss in the state, with prosecutors using a law usually associated with gangsters to try the former president, attorneys and others Accusing helpers of a “criminal enterprise” keep him in power.
The nearly 100-page indictment details dozens of actions taken by Trump or his allies to reverse his defeat, including asking Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to find enough votes to win the embattled state; harassing a poll worker who faced false allegations of fraud; and trying to persuade Georgia lawmakers to ignore the will of voters and appoint a new list of Electoral College electors pro-Trump.
One particularly brazen episode also details a conspiracy in which one of his attorneys in a rural Georgia county is to access voting machines and steal data from a voting machine company.
“The indictment alleges that instead of complying with Georgia’s legal process for election disputes, the defendants engaged in a criminal extortion operation to overturn the results of Georgia’s presidential election,” said Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, whose Office had filed the case at a late date. night press conference.
Other defendants include former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows; Trump attorney and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani; and a Justice Department official in the Trump administration, Jeffrey Clark, who supported the then-president’s efforts to redeem his Georgia election defeat. Other attorneys, including John Eastman, Sidney Powell and Kenneth Chesebro, who put forward legally questionable ideas to overturn the results, were also charged.
She also said she intends to request a trial date within six months and that she intends to try the accused together.
A spate of nine Trump allies have already turned themselves in the Georgia jail this week ahead of Friday’s deadline
CLASSIFIED DOCUMENTS – Hearing scheduled for May 20, 2024
Special Counsel Jack Smith led two federal investigations related to Trump, both of which resulted in indictments against the former president.
The first indictments that emerged from those investigations came in June, when Trump was charged with mishandling top-secret documents at his Florida estate. The indictment alleged that Trump had repeatedly hired aides and lawyers to help him hide documents requested by investigators and blithely produced a Pentagon “plan of attack” and a classified map.
A replacement indictment issued in July added more counts accusing Trump of demanding the deletion of surveillance footage at his Mar-a-Lago estate after FBI and Justice Department investigators visited him in June 2022 to investigate classified information to collect documents he took with him after leaving the White House. The prosecution also alleges that he illegally kept a document that he allegedly showed to visitors in New Jersey.
Overall, Trump is confronted with 40 criminal offenses in the case of the secret documents. The most serious charge carries a prison sentence of up to 20 years.
Walt Nauta, a valet for Trump, and Carlos De Oliveira, the property manager at Trump’s Florida home, were accused in the case of plotting to hide surveillance footage from federal investigators and lying about it.
Trump and Nauta have pleaded not guilty. De Oliveira is due to be charged on Tuesday.
US District Judge Aileen Cannon has set the hearing date for May 20, 2024. If that date is set, it means that a potential trial will begin well into the president’s nomination calendar and likely long after the Republican nominee is known—but before that person is formally nominated at the Republican National Convention.
In the case of the secret documents, Trump is accused of 40 criminal offenses
ELECTION BREAKDOWN – Trial date to be confirmed
Smith’s second trial against Trump opened in August when the former president was charged with a felony for working to overturn the results of the 2020 election ahead of his supporters’ violent riots in the US Capitol.
The four-count indictment includes charges of conspiracy to defraud the United States government and conspiracy to obstruct an official process: Congressional confirmation of Biden’s victory. It describes how Trump repeatedly told his supporters and others that he had won the election, knowing it was wrong, and how he tried to convince state officials, Vice President Mike Pence and eventually Congress to overturn the legitimate results .
After weeks of a campaign of lies about the election results, prosecutors allege that Trump sought to exploit the violence in the Capitol, citing it as a reason to further delay the vote count that sealed his defeat.
In their indictment documents, prosecutors pointed to half a dozen unindicted co-conspirators, including lawyers inside and outside the government, who they say worked with Trump to defeat the election results and devised legally questionable schemes to capture sham voter lists in contested states had by Biden.
The Trump campaign called the allegations “false” and asked why it took two and a half years to come forward.
Pro-Trump protesters rallied around the Capitol before breaching and overrunning it
HUSH MONEY SCHEME – Trial is scheduled for March 25, 2024
Trump became the first former US president in history to be prosecuted when he faced state charges in New York in March for paying hush money during the 2016 presidential campaign to cover up allegations of extramarital sexual encounters.
He pleaded not guilty to 34 counts of forging business records. Each charge is punishable by up to four years in prison. However, it’s not clear whether a judge would hand down a jail sentence if Trump were convicted.
The counts are related to a series of checks made to his attorney, Michael Cohen, to compensate him for his role in paying off porn actor Stormy Daniels, who claimed a sexual encounter with Trump in 2006 shortly after Melania Trump gave birth to her child had given birth to son, Barron. These payments were noted in various internal company documents as payments for a statutory advance that prosecutors said did not exist.
The former president is expected to appear in state court on Jan. 4, before Republicans begin their nomination process in earnest.
CIVIL CASES IN NEW YORK – Trial begins October 23, 2023
New York Attorney General Letitia James has sued Trump and the Trump Organization, alleging they misled banks and tax authorities about the value of assets, including golf courses and skyscrapers, in order to obtain credit and tax benefits.
This lawsuit could result in civil penalties against the company if James, a Democrat, prevails. She is demanding a $250 million fine and a business ban for Trump in New York. The Manhattan Attorney’s Office investigated the same alleged behavior but did not file a criminal complaint.
A civil trial in state court is planned for October.
In a separate civil trial in federal court in New York in May, Trump was found guilty of sexually abusing and defaming former magazine columnist E. Jean Carroll in the mid-1990s. The jury rejected Carroll’s claim that Trump raped her in a dressing room.
Trump was ordered to pay Carroll $5 million. He has appealed and firmly denied her allegations. In July, a federal judge upheld the jury’s verdict against Trump, dismissing the former president’s claims that the award was overdone.
TRUMP MAKES HISTORY
Trump made history after becoming the first former president to pose for a mugshot after being arrested for attempting to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results.
It was his first tweet since January 2021, when he was blocked from Twitter following the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
He had traveled to Georgia from his home in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Thursday afternoon.
His motorcade first headed to Newark Airport, and the New York-born billionaire boarded his Boeing 757 to fly to Atlanta.
Trump then declared on the tarmac that it was “a very sad day for America”.
He said it was “a travesty of justice,” adding, “We did nothing wrong, I did nothing wrong.”
“This is election interference.” So I want to thank you for being here. “We did nothing wrong,” Trump said. “We had every right, every single right, to contest an election that we felt was dishonest.”
He was the twelfth of the 19 defendants to surrender.
Trump, like everyone else, had his personal information collected, fingerprinted and mugshot before posting bail and being released.
Trump said the trial was “a horrific experience.”
He was in jail less than 25 minutes, although common criminal charges can expect to wait hours for their processing.