Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis is giving former President Donald Trump and his 18 alleged co-conspirators until noon Aug. 25 to voluntarily surrender and avoid arrest, she said at a news conference late Tuesday night.
Willis’ news conference came soon after a grand jury voted to indict Trump and his co-defendants, including former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, on a combined 41 criminal charges related to Trump’s scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
“Every individual charged in the indictment is charged with one count of violating Georgia’s [RICO] law through participation in a criminal enterprise in Fulton County, Georgia, and elsewhere to accomplish the illegal goal of allowing Donald J. Trump to seize the presidential term of office,” Willis said, ticking off the names of all 19 defendants.
Willis’ deadline means it is likely Trump will face arraignment in Fulton County sometime before Aug. 25, a Friday. She also noted she hopes to “move the case along” and set a trial date sometime in the next six months and initially said she hoped to try all 19 defendants simultaneously.
She also defended herself from Trump’s repeated claims that she is acting merely as a partisan Democrat, noting she has a long history as a prosecutor and as a specialist in Georgia’s state-level version of the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO), which is being used in this case.
“The law is completely nonpartisan,” said Willis, who first took office in January 2021. “To date, this office has indicted, since I’ve been district attorney, over 12,000 cases. This is the 11th RICO indictment. We follow the same process, we look at the law, we look at the facts and we bring charges.”