Former President Donald Trump surrendered Thursday evening and was booked at the Fulton County Jail in Atlanta. Trump faces 13 felony counts in Georgia related to efforts to overturn the state’s 2020 election result.
Trump’s appearance in Georgia comes a day after the first Republican primary debate, which he skipped. Trump is currently the party’s front-runner for the 2024 presidential nomination.
Trump was released on a $200,000 bond shortly after being processed.
The 18 other defendants in Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis’ wide-reaching criminal case have until Friday at noon to turn themselves in for booking.
Many have already surrendered, including Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, and Trump’s former lawyers, John Eastman, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell. The sheriff’s office is making mugshots available to the media each afternoon.
“It doesn’t matter your status,” Fulton County Sheriff Pat Labat recently told reporters. “We will have a mugshot ready for you.”
In Fulton County, a booking appearance is separate from an arraignment, where a defendant issues a plea on their charges.
For most of the case’s 19 defendants, bond terms will have been negotiated in advance so they don’t have to spend long in jail awaiting a hearing, says Bob Rubin, a criminal defense attorney in Decatur, Georgia. A few defendants have surrendered in the middle of the night to avoid long processing times.
On Monday, a judge signed off on an agreement between prosecutors and Trump’s lawyers to set bond at $200,000. Bond has ranged between $10,000 and $200,000, depending on the defendant’s charges.
Rubin says bond conditions consider factors like a defendant’s flight risk, danger to the community, and the likelihood of intimidating witnesses or committing another felony.
Trump’s bond agreement requires that he refrain from intimidating co-defendants or witnesses, including through social media. He is not allowed to communicate with any co-defendants about the facts of the case except through his lawyer.
“Despite saying they’re going to treat them the same as everybody else, they’re going to make sure no one’s going to get hurt in this jail,” Rubin says. “It would look really bad, so I’m sure the sheriff’s office is going to make every effort to segregate them from other inmates who may be dangerous.”
Trump’s summer of scandal began in New York, where Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg charged him with campaign finance violations, claiming the former president made hush-money payments to a porn star and Playboy bunny to bury their stories of having had affairs with him.
He was then hit with federal charges of illegally withholding classified documents at his Florida mansion after leaving office and for illegally working to disrupt the formal counting of the votes in Congress that confirmed his loss in the 2020 election.
But it took until Trump’s fourth indictment on state charges in Georgia, alleging that he and 18 others conspired to illegally overturn the 2020 election in which he narrowly lost the state to Biden, for a mugshot to formally appear.
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