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If Donald Trump is to be charged for the fourth time this year as part of the Georgia election interference case, the indictment against the former president could be made available to the public almost immediately.
Reports strongly suggest that a grand jury will vote on whether an indictment in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' probe against Trump can be brought against the former president and others as early as Tuesday.
In a series of posts on X, formerly Twitter, Anna Bower, a Georgia-based reporter for Lawfare who has been focusing on the investigation, explained that unlike federal cases—such as the classified documents and the January 6 cases where Trump has pleaded not guilty to 40 and 4 charges, respectively, or the falsifying business records case in New York where Trump has denied 34 felony counts—indictments in Georgia are not filed under seal.
This means that if an indictment is announced against Trump, it will be made available to the public almost straight away.
"After the indictment is handed up to the judge, it will be brought to the clerk's office to be stamped, filed, and made available to the public," Bower posted on X.
"So, this won't be like the NY case or classified docs case, both which involved a significant delay between return of the indictment & public access to the document. Here, there could be a slight delay as the clerks copy the indictment, but I expect it will be just that—slight," she wrote.
Trump, currently the frontrunner in the 2024 GOP presidential primary, has long denied any wrongdoing in connection to Willis' investigation and has accused the prosecutor of carrying out a politically motivated "witch hunt" with her election inquiry.
Newsweek reached out to Trump's office via email for comment.
Bowers said she expects Willis to start presenting her findings to a grand jury on Monday, with an indictment "likely" arriving by Tuesday evening.
The grand jury in Georgia has been hearing evidence and witness testimony for the past month. Willis previously instructed most of her staff to begin working remotely from July 31 to August 18 and requested that judges not schedule trials or in-person hearings until mid-August, a strong indicator that charges could be announced around then.
Orange barricades have been outside the Fulton County court where the grand jury has been seated for several days, with the Fulton County Sheriff's Office confirming that this was a security measure to deal with any reaction to the "high profile legal proceedings" at the building.
A minimum of 12 of the 16 members of the Fulton County grand jury must vote that there are grounds for an incident for charges to be brought forward in Willis' election probe.
As noted by Bower, the jury must only believe there is "probable cause" that a crime has been committed, which she describes as an "extraordinarily low" standard of proof.
"It doesn't even require a showing that criminal conduct 'more likely than not' occurred," Bower posted. "In order to secure an indictment, prosecutors just need to show that there is a 'fair probability' of criminal activity."
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump hit out at Willis while defending his "perfect" January 2021 phone call with Georgia's Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, in which the former president asked him to "find" the 11,870 votes needed to beat Joe Biden at the last election, which triggered the Fulton County investigation.
Trump also repeated an unsubstantiated claim that Willis had an affair with a gang member she was investigating. In an email sent by her office, obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Willis called the accusation "derogatory and false."
"Why is 'Phoney' (Like in PERFECT 'PHONE' CALL, get it?) Fani Willis, the severely underperforming D.A. of Fulton County who is being accused of having an 'affair' with a Gang Member of a group that she is prosecuting, leaking my name in regard to a Grand Jury pertaining to Election Fraud & Irregularities that I say took place in Georgia," Trump wrote.
"I made a PERFECT PHONE CALL OF PROTEST. What does Phoney Fani have to do with me? She should instead focus on the record number of murders in Atlanta!"
About the writer
Ewan Palmer is a Newsweek News Reporter based in London, U.K. His focus is reporting on US politics, and Florida ... Read more