Racketeering charges: Trump to surrender on Thursday
By AFP
Donald Trump said he will turn himself in on Thursday in Georgia to face racketeering and other charges stemming from his bid to overturn the 2020 election.
Writing on his platform Truth Social on Monday, Trump said that that day he would be “ARRESTED by a Radical Left District Attorney, Fani Willis,” the Georgia official who brought the year’s fourth indictment against the former president.
The judge in the case earlier approved a $200,000 bond for Trump in the racketeering case filed against him in the southern state.
Trump and the 18 other co-defendants in the landmark case have until noon (1600 GMT) on Friday to turn themselves in to the authorities in Georgia to be booked.
In his post Trump said Willis is acting “in strict coordination with Crooked Joe Biden’s DOJ. It is about ELECTION INTERFERENCE.”
This is Trump’ way of saying all the charges against him are contrived to block his bid for another term in the White House as he leads the field of Republican hopefuls by a mile.
Aside from a $200,000 bond for the Republican billionaire, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee imposed several conditions in an agreement approved by prosecutors and Trump attorneys.
“The Defendant shall perform no act to intimidate any person known to him or her to be a codefendant or witness in this case or to otherwise obstruct the administration of justice,” McAfee said in a three-page court filing.
“The above shall include, but are not limited to, posts on social media or reposts of posts made by another individual on social media,” the judge said.
McAfee set bond at $100,000 each for two co-defendants in the case — former Trump campaign attorneys John Eastman and Kenneth Chesebro.
Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has asked the judge to set a trial date of March 4 next year for the 77-year-old former president on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election result in Georgia.
Trump is facing four criminal trials as he bids for a return to the White House.
Trump was indicted in Georgia on charges of racketeering and a string of election crimes after a sprawling, two-year probe into his efforts to overturn his election defeat to Biden in the Peach State.
Others facing charges in the alleged conspiracy include Trump’s former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and his White House chief of staff, Mark Meadows.
– ‘Speedy trial’ –
Special counsel Jack Smith has asked a federal judge to set a January 2, 2024 date for the former president to go on trial in Washington on separate charges of conspiring to upend the results of the 2020 election.
Trump’s attorneys asked Judge Tanya Chutkan last week to schedule the trial for April 2026 — long after next year’s presidential vote.
They argued that the amount of documents in the case would require months to process.
Smith pushed back in a court filing on Monday saying Trump’s defense team “exaggerates the challenge of reviewing” the evidence presented in the case.
“A proposed trial date in 2026 would deny the public its right to a speedy trial,” the special counsel said.
Chutkan is to decide the date for the trial at a hearing on August 28.
Trump also faces a trial in New York in March 2024 for allegedly making hush money payments to a porn star in a bid to cheat campaign finance rules ahead of the 2016 election.
He is scheduled to go on trial in Florida in May on charges also brought by Smith of mishandling top secret government documents he took from the White House as he left office.
