BULLETIN: The Fulton County Grand Jury has handed down 10 indictments related to the 2020 presidential election. The Fulton County clerk said it could take up to 3 hours to learn who is named in the 10 reported indictments handed up tonight. Click here to join Todd’s private Facebook group for conservatives.
The clerk has to manually type them into system. This is absolutely unprecedented in American political history. Those indicted will not be told in advance. They will learn of the charges once they are released to the media.
Prosecutors in Fulton County were presenting evidence to the grand jury as they pushed toward what’s increasingly looking like Indictment No. 4 for Trump, summoning multiple former state officials including the ex-lieutenant governor as witnesses.
But the process hit an unexpected snag in the middle of the day, when Reuters reported on a document listing criminal charges to be brought against Trump, including state racketeering counts, conspiracy to commit false statements and solicitation of violation of oath by a public officer.
The judge in Georgia is cracking jokes to the journalists in the room after signing off on the indictments against President Trump pic.twitter.com/zmjHaghake
— Greg Price (@greg_price11) August 15, 2023
Reuters, which later published a copy of the document, said the filing was taken down quickly. A spokesperson for Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis said the report of charges being filed was “inaccurate,” but declined to comment further on a kerfuffle that the Trump legal team rapidly jumped on to attack the integrity of the investigation.
The office of the Fulton County courts clerk later released a statement that seemed to only raise more questions, calling the posted document “fictitious,” but failing to explain how it got on the court’s website. The clerk’s office said documents without official case numbers “are not considered official filings and should not be treated as such.” But the document that appeared online did have a case number on it.
Asked about the “fictitious” document Monday evening, the courts clerk, Che Alexander, said: “I mean, I don’t know what else to say, like, grace … I don’t know, I haven’t seen an indictment, right, so I don’t have anything.” On the question of whether the website had been hacked, she said, “I can’t speak to that.”
Trump and his allies, who have characterized the investigation as politically motivated, immediately seized on the apparent error to claim that the process was rigged. Trump’s campaign aimed to fundraise off it, sending out an email with the since-deleted document embedded.
“The Grand Jury testimony has not even FINISHED – but it’s clear the District Attorney has already decided how this case will end,” Trump wrote in the email, which included links to give money to his campaign. “This is an absolute DISGRACE.”