ATLANTA (Reuters) — The Fulton County, Georgia, court’s website briefly posted a document on Monday listing several criminal charges against former U.S. President Donald Trump that appeared related to his attempts to overturn his 2020 election defeat in the state, before taking the document down without explanation.
The Fulton County District Attorney’s office said in a statement that no charges had been filed against Trump.
The document was dated Aug. 14 and named Trump, citing the case as “open,” but is no longer available on the court’s website. Reuters was not immediately able to determine why the item was posted or removed.
A document briefly posted on and then taken down from the official Fulton County, Georgia court website shows a list of potential felony charges against former President Donald Trump, after being downloaded by Reuters shortly before the court took the document back down without explanation, in Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. August 14, 2023. REUTERS/Julio-Cesar Chavez
“The Reuters report that those charges were filed is inaccurate. Beyond that we cannot comment,” a spokesperson for the District Attorney’s office said.
Trump, the front-runner for the 2024 Republican nomination to challenge Democratic President Joe Biden, has been criminally indicted three times so far this year, including once by U.S. Special Counsel Jack Smith on charges of trying to overturn his election defeat.
He has long dismissed the many investigations, including two impeachments, he has faced in his years in politics as a politically motivated “witch hunt.”
The Fulton County court clerk’s office in a statement said no documents had been filed on Monday related to the grand jury that has been hearing evidence in the case.
The office described what it called “a fictitious document that has been circulated online” without specifying whether it was the one listing criminal charges against Trump. A spokesperson for the clerk did not respond to a request for further detail.
A Georgia prosecutor, District Attorney Fani Willis, has been probing whether Trump and his allies illegally sought to overturn the state’s 2020 election results and has been expected to seek an indictment from a grand jury this week.
If Trump is charged in Georgia, it would mark his fourth indictment in less than five months, and the second to arise from his efforts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election.
Trump’s lawyers said the episode was “not a simple administrative mistake.”
“This is emblematic of the pervasive and glaring constitutional violations which have plagued this case from its very inception,” lawyers Drew Findling, Jennifer Little and Marissa Goldberg said in a statement.
Charges listed in the document included racketeering, a law used to target members of organizations engaged in illegal activity, as well as making false statements, filing false documents and several conspiracy charges.
Reporting by Timothy Ahmann; additional reporting by Jacqueline Thomsen, Joseph Ax and Sarah N. Lynch; Writing by Susan Heavey and Andy Sullivan; editing by Rami Ayyub, Scott Malone and Howard Goller
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