The State of Georgia v. Donald J. Trump, et al. was a criminal case against Donald Trump, the 45th and eventually-47th president of the United States, and 18 co-defendants. All defendants were charged with one count of violating Georgia's Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) statute, which would have had a penalty of 5–20 years in prison. The indictment came in the context of Trump's broader effort to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. The case was one of four criminal indictments against Trump, all charged in 2023.
Defendants were variously charged with 40 additional counts from other allegations, including: Trump and co-defendants plotted to create pro-Trump slates of fake electors; Trump called the Georgia secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, asking him to "find 11,780 votes", which would have reversed his loss in the state by a single vote margin; and a small group of Trump allies in Coffee County illegally accessed voting systems attempting to find evidence of election fraud.
Following an investigation launched in February 2021 by Fulton County district attorney Fani Willis, a grand jury of 23 citizens handed up the indictments on August 14, 2023. Her prosecution alleged that Trump led a "criminal racketeering enterprise", in which he and all other defendants "knowingly and willfully joined a conspiracy to unlawfully change the outcome" of the 2020 U.S. presidential election in Georgia.
The case was set to be heard in the Fulton County Superior Court with judge Scott F. McAfee presiding. Former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows, former Department of Justice (DOJ) official Jeffrey Clark, and three other defendants unsuccessfully sought to have their cases removed to federal court. Four defendants pleaded guilty to some charges, agreed to cooperate with the prosecution, and received sentences including probation, fines, and making public apologies.
After pausing the case, the Georgia Court of Appeals in December 2024 disqualified Willis from prosecuting it. In November 2025, Pete Skandalakis, executive director of the Prosecuting Attorneys' Council of Georgia, took on the role of prosecutor. Less than two weeks later, on November 26, he dropped all charges against all remaining defendants, ending the case.
Background
Prior to and during election day Weeks before the 2016 presidential election, Trump claimed through a series of tweets that widespread voter fraud was imminent, a sentiment echoed by his legal advisor, Rudy Giuliani. Trump repeated the accusations throughout his presidency and into his 2020 reelection campaign; for months, he prepared arguments in the event of his loss, primarily relating to mail-in ballots. As early as August 2020, he enlisted conservative activist and lawyer Cleta Mitchell to help overturn the election. Two days before Election Day (November 3, 2020), he told reporters that he would be "going in with [his] lawyers" as soon as the election was over.
On Election Day, preliminary surveys at polling places showed Trump in the lead as his supporters were more likely to turn out in person amid the COVID-19 pandemic, but his lead diminished as mail-in ballots were counted. At the behest of Giuliani, Trump declared in a 2a.m. election night speech in the East Room that he had won the election and that the counts being reported were fraudulent. As ballots were being counted, campaign data expert Matt Oczkowski bluntly informed Trump that he was going to lose the election. White House Counsel Pat Cipollone told him that invalidating the results of the election would be a "murder-suicide pact". Under then-attorney general William Barr, the Department of Justice failed to find widespread voter fraud in the election.
Former speaker of the House Newt Gingrich predicted that Trump voters would erupt in "rage", a sentiment shared by House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy, who told Laura Ingraham on The Ingraham Angle that Republicans should "not be silent about this".
Efforts to pressure Georgia state officials
On December 3, 2020, a 7-hour hearing of the Georgia Senate Committee on the Judiciary heard Trump's legal team, including Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman, made false claims alleging fraud and misconduct in the state's election process, and that the Georgia legislature had the power to appoint electors for Trump. A similar presentation was made to the Georgia House of Representatives Committee on Governmental Relations.
On December 7, Trump called Georgia House Speaker David Ralston asking him to convene a special session of the state legislature to overturn the Georgia election results.
In late December 2020 and early January 2021, Jeffrey Clark, the Assistant Attorney General for the Environment and Natural Resources Division and acting for the DOJ Civil Division, drafted a letter to Georgia officials stating the DOJ had "identified significant concerns that may have impacted the outcome of the election in multiple States", urging the Georgia legislature to convene a special session for the "purpose of considering issues pertaining to the appointment of Presidential Electors". Clark presented the draft letter to acting attorney general Jeffrey Rosen and his deputy Richard Donoghue for their signatures; they rejected the proposal and the letter was never sent.
Trump pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to change the state's election results during an hour-long conference call on January 2, 2021. Trump told Raffensperger, "What I want to do is this. I just want to find, uh, 11,780 votes, which is one more than [the 11,779-vote margin of defeat] we have, because we won the state."
On September 17, Trump wrote to Raffensperger, alleging that 43,000 ballots in DeKalb County had been mishandled and that Raffensperger should "start the process of decertifying the election, or whatever the correct legal remedy is, and announce the true winner." In the 2023 Georgia indictment, the 38th and 39th counts address this act.
Creation of false electoral vote documents
The plan to recruit false electors for Donald Trump and pressure public officials to accept them was spearheaded by Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman in support of the Trump campaign and with the awareness of Trump himself, although other campaign staff expressed doubts about the plan. The plan led to false documents being produced in seven states: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.
As is typical, the 16 potential electors for Trump in Georgia were chosen before the election. After Biden won the election, and days before the scheduled casting of electoral votes, the Republican electors received calls asking them to come to the Georgia State Capitol to cast "alternate" ballots, ostensibly in case Texas v. Pennsylvania was ruled in favor of Trump. However, that case was thrown out on December 11, 2020, three days before the electoral vote was to occur, a fact that was withheld from most of the fake electors by Giuliani and Kenneth Chesebro. Four members of the Republican electoral slate declined to participate, including former U.S. Senator Johnny Isakson, and were replaced.
Georgia fake electors convened in a meeting room at the state Capitol at the same time the true electors were meeting in the state Senate chamber. State senator Shawn Still verified fake electors' identities as they entered the room, but the meeting was reportedly open to the public, and video was posted that day. Unlike some other states, the Georgia false certificate of ascertainment did not contain language specifying it was to be used only if the Trump campaign prevailed in litigation (one state case, Trump v. Raffensperger, was still pending at the time). The falsified documents were then sent to the U.S. Senate and the National Archives by Giuliani and Chesebro's team.
Coffee County election equipment breach In the weeks after the election, Trump and his associates publicly disparaged electronic voting company Dominion Voting Systems. In particular, they claimed that ballots were being altered in a process known as "adjudication", intended to resolve minor errors. Trump asserted that human operators could switch Trump-intended votes to Biden votes.
On January 7, someone who had posed as a fake elector, and who had communicated with the Coffee County elections supervisor about election office access, escorted two Trump operatives into the office, which was captured on surveillance video. Allegedly assisted by employees of the data forensics firm SullivanStrickler, they copied data from voting equipment. In a recorded phone conversation, Atlanta Trump supporter Scott Hall recalled that the team "scanned every freaking ballot", including equipment and that they had "imaged all the hard drives" used on Election Day. The Washington Post reported in September 2023 that during the weeks following the 2020 election Hall had conversations with leaders of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Georgia. Georgia prosecutors said Hall had a 63-minute phone conversation with Jeffrey Clark on January 2, 2021.
January 19 text messages between two men hired by the Trump legal team show intent to use the data to decertify the Georgia presidential results as well as the 2021 Georgia runoff election. The texts were between Sidney Powell associate Jim Penrose, a former National Security Agency official, and Doug Logan, whose firm Cyber Ninjas later ran the 2021 Maricopa County presidential ballot audit.
The firm SullivanStrickler was subpoenaed by the special grand jury convened in this case in 2022. The company has insisted it is "politically agnostic" and had simply accepted paid work as a third-party contractor for the Trump campaign. During the investigation, the two Trump operatives admitted that Sidney Powell had sent them and that they had accessed a voting machine inside the building. Cathy Latham, one of the fake electors who had escorted them into the building, invoked the Fifth Amendment.
Of the 18 co-defendants indicted on August 14, 2023, four—Powell, Hampton, Latham, and Hall—are charged in the Coffee County breach.
Harassment of Fulton County election workers After the election, Trump and Giuliani amplified a video that was taken out of context, and used the footage to make baseless claims that Ruby Freeman and her daughter Wandrea' ArShaye Moss had committed election fraud. Giuliani accused them of "passing around USB ports as if they were vials of heroin or cocaine" and engaging in "surreptitious illegal activity", citing video footage that, according to Moss, actually showed the women with "a ginger mint". The women and their family members were subjected to anti-Black racist smears and death threats and were warned by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) that they would not be safe in their home.
Freeman and Moss sued Giuliani for defamation in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in December 2021.
While the lawsuit was ongoing, Moss testified in a June 2022 public hearing before the U.S. House Select Committee on the January6 Attack. She said that, after Giuliani's remarks, she and her family were subjected to a barrage of racist threats, including "Be glad it's 2020 and not 1920", in reference to lynching in the United States. Freeman also testified: "There is nowhere I feel safe. Nowhere. Do you know how it feels to have the president of the United States target you?" Moss said that the false accusations against her had impacted her well-being "in a major way—in every way—all because of lies".