Former United States President Donald Trump has been hit with a fourth set of criminal charges by a grand jury in Georgia, which issued an indictment accusing him of efforts to overturn his 2020 election loss to Democrat candidate and winner Joe Biden.
    The charges, brought by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, add to the legal woes facing Trump, the frontrunner in the race for the Republican nomination for the 2024 presidential election.
    Prosecutors brought 11 counts against Trump and his associates, including forgery and racketeering, which is used to target members of organised crime groups.
    Prosecutors also charged 18 other people, including Mark Meadows, Trump’s former White House chief of staff, and lawyers Rudy Giuliani and John Eastman.
The indictment 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 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.
    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”.