Monday night’s announcement of indictments against former President Donald Trump and his allies on allegations that they conspired to overturn the 2020 election culminated after more than two years of investigation.
The Fulton case is the latest in a series of criminal and civil cases Trump faces as he campaigns to defeat Republican primary challengers and Democratic incumbent Joe Biden in 2024. It is the fourth criminal indictment and the second one on state charges.
According to David Becker, executive director of The Center for Election Innovation & Research, Trump and other supporters spread false allegations that the election was stolen in order to cause doubt in Georgia, Michigan, Pennsylvania and other states where Trump was defeated after the November election.
Several weeks later, Trump called Georgia’s GOP Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and asked him to find enough of the 11,780 votes to defeat Biden. Ultimately, that call became a lynchpin of the Fulton County 2020 election interference case.
Trump and his supporters continued to cast doubt on Georgia’s electronic voting systems, claiming the machines flipped votes in favor of Biden. Federal and state investigations have disproved these allegations.
“These were all an effort to weaponize the power of the federal government in order to overturn an election in which the sitting president had lost something,” Becker said during a media briefing on Friday. “We’ve never seen before in American history.”
This article originally appeared in florida phoenix