Democracy Dies in Darkness
Democracy in America

Trump’s tweets used against him in Georgia indictment

Georgia prosecutors pointed to the former president’s social media posts as support for racketeering charges

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August 15, 2023 at 5:20 p.m. EDT
A tweet by Donald Trump encouraging people to come to D.C. and protest on Jan. 6, 2021, is shown on a screen as the House select committee holds a public hearing investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. (Demetrius Freeman/The Washington Post)
5 min

In a criminal indictment filed Monday that alleged former president Donald Trump and 18 of his associates conspired to overturn Georgia’s 2020 election results, prosecutors repeatedly cited a rather uncommon piece of evidence to undergird their charges of racketeering: Twitter posts.

It was Trump’s fourth indictment since leaving office and, like the three others preceding it, it cited a slew of phone calls, meetings and false statements to allege wrongdoing. But, more prominently than in the other cases, prosecutors used Trump’s own tweets to implicate him, pointing to a dozen of his posts on Twitter as “overt” acts that “furthered the conspiracy.”