Lies about Michigan’s 2020 election told by former President Donald Trump and his attorney Rudy Giuliani are cited among the charges Trump and 18 associates are facing after being indicted by a grand jury in Fulton County, Georgia Monday.
This is the fourth indictment Trump is facing amid his third campaign for the presidency, and the second indictment directly related to his attempts to remain in office after losing the 2020 election.
From the infamous phone call where Trump asked Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find 11,780 votes,” Trump was charged with making 13 false statements to Raffensperger and two other state officials.
In Michigan, he claimed on the call, “a tremendous number of dead people” voted on November, 3, 2020 first asserting it was 18,000 before revising to “some unbelievably high number.”
A 2022 report from Michigan’s auditor general found 1,616 people who voted were dead on Election Day, mostly absentee voters who died after mailing in their ballots but before the election occurred. They represented 0.03% of the total vote, while the-candidate Joe Biden won the state by more than 154,000 votes. It was similar to the number of those votes found after the 2016 election, when Trump won Michigan.
Trump’s campaign issued a statement asserting the charges were nothing more than election interference.
“They are taking away President Trump’s First Amendment right to free speech, and the right to challenge a rigged and stolen election that the Democrats do all the time,” a statement posted to Trump’s site Truth Social read. “The ones who should be prosecuted are the ones who created the corruption.”
His attorneys Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg called the indictment “shocking and absurd” in a separate statement.
“We look forward to a detailed review of this indictment which is undoubtedly just as flawed and unconstitutional as this entire process has been,” they said in the statement.
The marquee charge Trump and 18 associate face falls under Georgia’s Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act, known as a RICO statute.
The law is usually applied to organized crime in order to charge groups of individuals who work together toward criminal goals – in this case, Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis contended in the 98-page indictment, to unlawfully change the outcome of the election in Georgia. The state’s RICO law, PBS Newshour notes, requires prosecutors to prove there was a “pattern of racketeering activity” by the individuals charged.
Two major events in Michigan after the 2020 election are among the 161 actions prosecutors presented as evidence of the conspiracy. The first was a Nov. 10 meeting with then-House Speaker Lee Chatfield and then-Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey in the White House’s Oval Office, where Trump reportedly asked them “have some backbone and do the right thing” by appointing electors who would support him.
The leaders, both Republicans, rebuffed Trump’s requests and later publicly pledged to follow the law. Shirkey later told congressional investigators he endured a pressure campaign to subvert the election results.
Prosecutors also cited an infamous Dec. 2, 2020 Michigan House Oversight Committee hearing where Giuliani and another indicted Trump attorney, Jenna Ellis, brought forward a parade of witnesses to try to convince legislator the election’s result was fraudulent and to appoint pro-Trump electors.
Giuliani’s untrue statement to a state senate panel in Georgia the next day, that a Dominion voting machine in Michigan’s Antrim County had switched votes from Trump to Biden on election night, was one of two statements prosecutors referenced in charging Giuliani, like Trump, with the crime of false statements and writings.
Trump allies are also facing charges in Michigan stemming from their assistance with Trump’s efforts. Sixteen Republicans have been charged for signing documents claiming to be Michigan’s legitimate electoral college representatives in December 2020, even as the true electors were being appointed in the state Capitol. They have all pleaded not guilty to eight forgery-related charges.
Another three Republicans, including former attorney general candidate Matt DePerno and former state Rep. Daire Rendon, are also facing charges for allegedly illegally taking voting machines from rural townships and tampering with them in a fruitless attempt to uncover fraud.
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